The trouble with symbolic links

There's a whole lot of ways to avoid symlinks already in widespread use: ld.so.conf, xdg and similar ad-hoc patterns of spreading config all over the filesystem (/usr/share, /etc, /lib), $PATH… this looks like an area that, for lack of any one well-thought-out answer, gets reinvented equally poorly by nearly everything. Symlinks are indeed a nightmare but taking them away would probably result in more of these.