That isn't really fair to say, Stefan.

Configuration (as with many things that sound simple) is annoying and difficult. Each configuration format has it's major downsides and it's definitely not up to us to come up with something special. In fact, if we tried to introduce a new format it would probably make more of a mess.

What we can do is try to take a format that is reasonably easy to read, easy to edit (JSON and XML are out), easy to understand multi-levels (that throws INI and Apache-style out the window) and has a good module support so we don't have to implement a new parser.

Dancer *is* really easy, and we tried to choose the easiest configuration format we could. I think we made a good decision. I'm sorry that format has downsides, but it doesn't mean we messed up, because any format will have some major downside.

I believe that in Dancer 2.0 we could abstract this away and you could have various engines for configuration reading. Still, this is a *very* small point to hold on to in the great scheme of things. I believe there are much better things to put our efforts (and patience) in.

Have a great day,
S.