Wouldn't it be nice if OSX kept its settings in text files under /etc like any civilized OS should?
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No, because then there wouldn't be such a nice API for managing live settings from within the programs themselves:
http://developer.apple.com/DOCUMENTATION/Cocoa/Reference/Fou...
And why exactly would keeping the settings human readable prevent someone from developing a nice API for managing them?
Oh... It wouldn't
Mac OS X preferences -were- human-readable (and editable), but that's not what makes the NSUserDefaults API so handy. What makes NSUserDefaults handy is the support for varying default domains (network, system, user) and dead-simple serialization of Objective-C basic types (strings, ints, dictionaries, arrays).
Additionally, Apple switched to a binary file format to improve performance in 10.5, which may be converted to/from the text format, or edited directly using the property list editor.
There's also nothing stopping a software author from documenting their settings file keys, and some do. However, most of the settings options you do see listed on that site are undocumented because they are unsupported.