Sometimes I'm not very comfortable with this "central" sort of approaches, as they get over-complicated by time.
Maybe it's the fear of change, but I like the simple sparse list of configuration files under /etc rather than the GNOME gconf XML repository.
By the same token, while the list of files under /var/log are a bit chaotic comparing them to syslog-ng approach, they are much simpler, and simplicity is good.