You've got the wrong end of the stick, I think.
There should be a command-line option to insmod that tells it where
to put the symtab file, and modprobe could read its config file to
tell where to put it, but the *default* (as I was careful to emphasize
in my original post) would be to put it in a standard place -- right
next to the module that was loaded. That is simple and easy to find
and use. You can always do your own configuration with modprobe's
configuration file, if you don't like the default. But as you notice
in your second paragraph, not everyone uses modprobe, and if only
for that reason modprobe is the wrong place to put the base capability.
(I have other reasons, but they are aesthetic, so I won't bring them
up here.)
Since there is already a more-or-less defacto standard for where to
put modules, ksymoops would know where to look by default for the
symtab files by default, and if there's a command-line options that
allows you to specify it, both insmod and modprobe users will be
happy.
michaelkjohnson