First, I'll second Harv's appreciation of your tutorial (not to mention the many others you've posted). The depth of your knowledge of OS X has frequently left me wondering about its source.
As regards the deletion of plists, though, while I understand your point that
"you should not be manipulating the .plist file yourself", OS X offers more than one seat-of-the-pants methods for accomplishing tasks that should, ideally, be carried out via Terminal, and this seems to be an instance thereof.
The "defaults system" is embodied in a background process named cfprefsd (short for Core Foundation PREFerenceS Daemon"). Initially, right after login, cfprefsd knows nothing. As applications start up, they ask cfprefsd for their saved settings. (Emphasis added)
Since plist deletion instructions traditionally include either logging out/in or restarting with the expectation that a new, default plist will have been created, won't cfprefsd's loading said new, default plist at login achieve the precise results that were envisioned when the original plist was deleted?
