I think the only two "real" differences between throwing stuff in a folder and the registry is that: * a uncorrupted registry hive is supposed to be Directed A

I think the only two "real" differences between throwing stuff in a folder and the registry is that: * a uncorrupted registry hive is supposed to be Directed Acyclic Graph, (while a modern filesystem can have arbitrary cycles with symlinks and bind mounts and junctions) and; * the registry has more limited name length limits, even assuming Windows somewhat low filesystem name length limits.