I'm not sure why reading and writing the registry is considered a bad interface for programmatic system administration. I realize text files can be processed b

I'm not sure why reading and writing the registry is considered a bad interface for programmatic system administration. I realize text files can be processed by utilities for working with text files. And text files can be read by humans without any tools, and in that sense are rather universal. I wonder what I'm missing. I'd go so far as to think an OS that had a database at its core, or perhaps a persistent lisp would be even more programmable and legible. Maybe better tools for dealing with structured data would help this?