Imagine every setting in ~/.config and /etc is stored in corresponding SQLite database, and you have common interface to access both.

Now imagine this database is not a great engineering product like SQLite but really, really REALLY fucking sucks at being database, and slows down quickly with sizing up.

Now imagine there is no sensible way to get obsolete data out of it, and as every program uses same file it just gathers, and gathers, and gathers...