Right, but a piece of software having a distribution maintainer doesn't mean it will never have bugs, and if it's a container there's already much less risk of

Right, but a piece of software having a distribution maintainer doesn't mean it will never have bugs, and if it's a container there's already much less risk of it breaking my system. As for your second paragraph, that's very idealistic. Config can live in /var, /usr, /home, /usr/local, literally anywhere. I find it much nicer when all data / configuration for a piece of software is all self contained.