I think one of the reasons that about:config is not easy to use is because it shouldn't be easy to use.
If it was a nice window with checkboxes and dropdowns and tabs for groups of related options, then it would become a de facto settings dialog a thousand times more problematic than the legitimate settings dialog.
1) search Google about something, read blog, follow instructions is an amazing pattern people have learned and apply regardless of wisdom or skill
It might be good for you to remember that those "masses" are just people with other things to do with their lives - they're doctors, lawyers, concert violinists, nuclear physicists, biologists, teachers, ... and they just want their damned browser to work without having to mess around, and preferably not break with cryptic error messages they don't care about, because, frankly, they have better things to do.
It's only the advanced users who are willing go through this path because they want to tweak a settings. And the question would be, is it really worth making such an impractical tool out of about:config and thus wasting time of advanced users when it was designed for their own use, for the sake of keeping non-advanced users out this setting panel.
But then please for the love of god make about:config something that can be used without trawling mozilla.org discussion threads or random about.com 'articles'. There are hundreds and hundreds of about:config options, most of them more useless than the next, except for maybe 25 or so of them. If mozilla is already tracking so much, why don't they track the most-often changed settings through about:config and put them in their own section at the top of the list? Or, here's a radical idea, why don't they put the options in a tree rather than a flat list? Maybe ordered in a way that makes a bit of sense, but I may be pushing it there, I know. Why are we punched in the face with an 'options' dialog that (it seems) should have, in the eyes of most 'designers', only a very few options to the point where it becomes useless for 'advanced users', or kicked in the behind with an about:config page that could, functionally, just have well displayed 50 kb of output from /dev/urandom?
This : http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-cost... applies not to just Google Reader, guys... I've been using Firefox since the milestone builds of what back them was still just called 'Mozilla', if I'm remembering correctly, and I have yet to find something better (at least if you count in all the addins) but damn, if I were religious I'd do a prayer every time I see it 'installing updates', out of fear of what it's going to screw me over with in 'interface innovation' this time.
(done ranting now)