> That's a developer choice, not the registry in and of itself. You could just as easily have /etc filled files with GUIDs for file names.

For sure, that's why I said I have no issue with the concept but rather how it's used in practice.

> Microsoft does for Windows components to map the internal object ID of whatever they're dealing with; my assumption is for ease of recognition/documentation on their side (and generally the assumption that the end user shouldn't be playing around in there).

That's maybe fair, but most of that stuff isn't stuff the user even needs to access most of the time. Maybe separating it out from all the HKLM and HKCU software trees would have made sense.