Alan, I've been thinking about this, and trying to come up with something coherent to say. First, I have high confidence that were this change implemented, it would have made it somewhat harder for me to learn FreeRADIUS back when I started. (That was about a year before I got involved with moonshot for an entirely different project). I was vaguely familiar with RADIUS, certainly knew what an access-accept and access-request packet were, but had never read RFC 2865. I did know where RFC 2865 was if I wanted it. I was acting as a sysadmin, not a developer with regard to FreeRADIUS at the time. That said, as a developer sometimes working on FreeRADIUS, I find the current config and especially its interactions with the code incredibly confusing. I agree that your proposal would make things easier for developers. Unfortunately, I also agree with the comments that say you're making things easier for developers at the expense of your users. I think this will be harder for sysadmins. I've been struggling trying to figure out why in hopes that I could explain it. Here's my best shot so far. You're focusing on things that coders want to think about: sending packets, receiving packets, processing packets. However, that's not what sysadmins want to do. Sysadmins want to authorize and authenticate users. They want to log information/accounting data. They want to apply policy. You're taking the configuration further away from that and focusing it more on packet flows. You're asking the sysadmins to make the kind of jumps in abstraction that are important to developers. Yeah, the best devops people will be able to follow you. Even they will struggle a bit if they are not developers for your product. Also, I'd urge you to think about backward compatibility. Again, in the interest of focusing on users' needs rather than developers' needs. being able to support configs for large numbers of years is important. Programs like Sendmail, Postfix, Bind, etc, allow you to mostly keep the same conplex configuuration for 5-10 years. That's really important when I have my sysadmin/devops hat on. Updating the default configuration is fine. However every time I see another config option deprecated/another perfectly valid existing config suddenly become invalid, I think "Ah, there FreeRADIUS goes hating its users again." --Sam