[NTSysADM] User State Migration Tool unusable?

[Klaus Hartnegg]

Microsoft offers USMT (User State Migration Tool) to transfer settings 
from one Windows version to another, or from one PC to another.

But while the older program "Easy Transfer" could (in Win7) be told to 
copy the whole directories appdata\roaming and documents, USMT copies 
only the files and directory which are specifically declared in xml 
files. They must be declared separately for each and every application. 
Example: USMT knows Firefox (version 3), but not Thunderbird.

Wouldn't it be much easier, and must less risk of data loss, to replace 
the XML files with ones that simply copy the whole roaming and documents 
directories? What disadvantage would this have (except wasting a few 
megabytes, because not everything is really still needed)?

And regarding the documents directories: from the XML files it appears 
that USMT transfers only files with certain filename extensions. 
Microsoft provides a rather long default list, but of course such a list 
can never be complete.

Also I found that USMT silently skips all shortcuts which point to 
server directories, if they are not accessible during restore (which is 
nearly impossible to achieve, when a PC has more than one user, and each 
user has the home directory mapped to the same drive letter). Google 
found a recommendation to edit MigUser.xml, comment out 
"filter='MigXmlHelper.IgnoreIrrelevantLinks()'". I did this in the 
sections Desktop Files and Shared Desktop Files, but in my test this did 
not help.

Am I the only one who thinks that this whole concept is insane, because 
it will almost unevitably lose important data?