Registry is a good idea. They just had to iterate on it a little bit more, IMO. More data types (like enums), better interoperability with standard tools, built-in documentation, better UI, exposed backup/restore functions. Registry had great potential. It's better than flat /etc filesystem with miriads of configuration formats and clunky non-coherent documentation scattered all over. They did not realize this potential, unfortunately.

It’s an inelegant relic from a very, very distant past. A poor design decision that QDOS copied from CP/M more than 40 years ago and that Windows users are made to deal with to this day.

The registry is a database where a folder should be. It’s such a bad idea that Microsoft doesn’t use it for its new apps since .NET