Good idea, no question,
but some explanations, why we wont do it next time. The idea of the config file is to have a possibility to reset a store to default values with ftp and phpmyadmin. For us developers it is nice, because we can set then as standard the debug output and enable the "risky db tools).
Oscar wrote in that time his own parser and the whole trouble started with that. It is now working and in a normal store this file is only read one time, so I dont see any need to change it. I just named it .ini to show that is a file with initialising values.