The fact that settings are in a text file that I can easily sync is a GOOD thing. I don't have to rely on some godawful third party service to sync settings, I can just export them to Dropbox or throw them on a Git repo. This is one of the many things people love about Vim too, that you can set up your editor in a minute instead of trawling through GUI menus.
While flat files are a good thing, that doesn't preclude having a good interface in your app that lets you edit them. Furthermore, that is not an unfair expectation for an app that wants to be considered a good Mac citizen.
The last bit is in response to the parent post by frou_dh:
I feel ST2 is healthily past "good enough" as a Mac application.
The difficulty here is to ensure said interface doesn't make trivial changes to the flat files. Emacs has this down. As a counterexample, Visual Studio 2010 stores its settings in an XML file that, after pretty-printing, is quite human-readable. But, formatting aside, VS tends to reorder elements in this file even when you don't change anything, making sensible source control unnecessarily difficult. The somewhat manual workaround is to store important settings in a well-formatted settings file and use this as what VS calls "team" settings, because the IDE doesn't write or rewrite team settings files; this is also a nice solution because you probably don't want to sync things like window sizes and positions between a desktop with a 27" monitor and an 11" MacBook Air, and team settings only override local settings when they're defined.
I 100% agree with this. I was able to easily sync my settings between Linux, Windows and OS X for ST2, and easily find options because they are all in ONE file (Ctrl+F -what I need-), esp. considering they are very well documented. Still not as good as Netbeans for PHP/HTML (especially since it's not free), but a good settings system.
