I think there are a few key benefits to a centralized manager over the distributed file listener. 1. coordination between services on reconf. 2. Consistent imp

I think there are a few key benefits to a centralized manager over the distributed file listener. 1. coordination between services on reconf. 2. Consistent implementation on what constitutes a change through the API on the central server. By making it API based you can hook into these updates and cause reconfs and coordinated responses (like rolling bounces) through that system as opposed to each system polling the file and hoping that the order comes out in the wash. You could with enough work make it so that a client was aware of how to handle individual diffs from the file and coordinates through the file but at that point your now distributing common parsing logic across multiple systems (and potentially implementations) rather than a central system which sounds awfully un-DRY.