I agree with you in general, but the problem is that there are too many
tuning knobs already. Asking the user to go through a complicated list
of checklist items, which for typical usage will always be set in a
certain way, is just poor design. Especially since we're not even
testing most of the combinations of compilation options --- that's
combinatorically impossible right now.
I appreciate the testing issue, but I don't think we're ready for one
size fits all yet. I don't think it's poor design to have a lot of
options available, if there are good reasons for it. Perhaps there's
a way of requiring (for people who use xconfig or menuconfig, at
least) people to do something slightly unusual to have more config
options exposed.