FUSE for generating legacy config directories?

So I'm sitting here staring at my whiteboard with the todo of setting up a monitoring system and I'm thinking to my self, I just don't want to write all those config files right now. Then I thought about the webui that used to exist that would let you define all your monitoring rules nice and easy, and then it would just write out all your configs to disk for you. That was easy, but then I remembered how sick to my stomach I felt that I let my webserver have write permissions to /etc so that it could work.

That's when a random thought popped into my head. Why not use FUSE as a bridge. So you can have all the config data in a db of some sort, and instead of letting the webserver write  to the filesystem (shudder), we have fuse query the db and create a virtual directory with config files based on the contents of the db. Then I thought, wow, you know, you could also enable easy scaling with something like that...have multiple hosts with the same config updated straight from the db in realtime.

Now I'm wondering why this type of system isn't used for just about EVERY legacy system with weird or archane config files (tomcat with it's boat loads of xml configs, I'm looking at you)? Or is this like every good idea I come up with, it's already been done and I've just never stumbled across it yet? So if anyone reads this blog post, and you've seen this being done, post a comment, share a link, something. I'm very interested to see if this idea is being used. If not...why not?

In either case, this is definitely something I plan on trying out. Not sure what yet. Maybe it will be nagios or shinken or one of the other things that relies on nagios config files.