Because then there'd be hundreds of settings in the same folder. This isn't a user-visible menu or a wizard for configuring security settings, this is something

Because then there'd be hundreds of settings in the same folder. This isn't a user-visible menu or a wizard for configuring security settings, this is something for expert users to really modify how their OS is designed. Your suggestion is akin to putting every RHEL/SLED/Ubuntu security setting into one flat configuration file. IPSec, Sudo (and gksudo and friends), anti-virus, cryptfs, apparmor / selinux, ufw / iptables, package signing requirements (including repositories to use), etc. Something like that would never happen even if Red Hat did control all of the pieces of the puzzle. Now contrast Linux versus Windows here: if you want to configure those things you have to discover the tools or file formats for each security layer configuration manually, versus going into "gpedit.msc" and having categorized settings for the whole OS.