It's more than that. Philosophically, I believe the designer's goal involves making decisions for the user. If the decisions are good, it's a good design and the user is content. I do not believe it's the designer's goal to defer everything to the user. As a bonus, making decisions early tends to simplify the design. This is why there are no stty modes or resource files in Plan 9.
And why there are no 'dot files', although that issue also involves the avoidance of dot files filling up your home directory silently and slowing down every command that reads the most important directory in your world for the sake of customizability. A $USER/lib directory is a much sounder place to put such things. On a related note, I see no merit whatsoever in separating 'mechanism' from 'policy'. If the best design involves conflating them, go for it. -rob
