That’s nice, shame it’s not maintained. On the other hand, one the goals of XDG is to differentiate between application cache, actual settings etc. If FooApp stores 2GB cache file in .foo, redirecting it blindly to .config just makes my backups that much harder.
You can ask this question for most of unix. Why /etc? Why /bin and /usr/bin? (Answer: At one time hard disks were very small and crashed a lot), why do we presume screens are black and white, etc, etc.
Try to change any of it though, and a lot of luddites will come out screaming bloody murder. It's just not UNIX if it makes sense.
The origins of /etc are lost in history. Wikipedia [1] says that at Bell Labs /etc was pronounced "et caetera," and contained files that didn't belong elsewhere. And it had the advantage over conf or misc that it was only 3 letters.
"There has been controversy over the meaning of the name itself. In early versions of the UNIX Implementation Document from Bell labs, /etc is referred to as the etcetera directory as this directory historically held everything that did not belong elsewhere (however, the FHS restricts /etc to static configuration files and may not contain binaries)."
