Here are my peeves. None of them are really things that make me actively hate launchd, they're just things that I think could be done better. 1. Too many diffe

Here are my peeves. None of them are really things that make me actively hate launchd, they're just things that I think could be done better. 1. Too many different launchd file locations. See for instance http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18502705/how-to-know-a-specifix-launchd-plist-file-location http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18502705/how-to-know-a-sp... -- this can make it difficult to troubleshoot a startup issue or get a handle on what is and isn't being started and when. 2. .plist files are a binary format, ostensibly to save space, which seems a little bit ridiculous on an operating system like recent versions of MacOS X. So you have to use a separate set of tools just to interact with them. This also means that it's harder to fix corruption of .plist files or troubleshoot strange values they may have; in a plain text format, you'd just open it up in vi or emacs or whatever, and if you know what you're doing, you could find and fix anything that doesn't make sense. 3. The XML format in general isn't a very nice way to handle configuration files. Unless you've got syntax highlighting, it's hard to read. 4. Complex declarative configuration files aren't my favorite thing regardless, because it's hard to know what your options are and what the right values for those options are. With simple configuration systems where there is are several sets of values, and each set of values has the same half-dozen or so options, it's not so bad. But, in cases where you can have hundreds of different options, and not all of them documented well, an optimal configuration can turn in to a bit of black magic. I guess maybe #4 doesn't really apply directly to .plists, since they're not intended to be edited by the user, they're intended to just be for application developers. But I'm not sure that's a point in their favor either.