I'm not sure the opposite of "configuration" should be called "convention" - the worst abuses I've seen of punting to user configuration have been ones where th

I'm not sure the opposite of "configuration" should be called "convention" - the worst abuses I've seen of punting to user configuration have been ones where the best solution was only determinable at runtime. (e.g. compare user-configured fixed window sizes in the doomed ISO protocol stack with dynamic window control in TCP) Typically the user doesn't know best - they copied a config that worked for someone else, years ago on a different machine and workload, and don't know what any of the parameters actually mean. In the worst case (sendmail?) you have O(0) people who actually know how to use the configuration language, and 10 competing higher-level config generators.