The windows registry isn't a binary blob; It's a filesystem. A mountable, grow-and-shrinkable filesystem, that happens to be mounted from a loopback device. You

The windows registry isn't a binary blob; It's a filesystem. A mountable, grow-and-shrinkable filesystem, that happens to be mounted from a loopback device. You can mount arbitrary SAM files at arbitrary paths in your windows registry (though I don't recommend ever doing it). This isn't really an argument for the windows registry (it's a whole separate filesystem just for configs? With none of the versioning, inheritance, whatever features you want for configs?), but it is another way to think of it.