See D7351 for some more info.
But discussion there is starting to go beyond concerns of just that patch. Even if that patch is reverted we're still left with a bug.
If I delete my ~/.elementary directory I'm subjected to "thumb scrolling" by default, which does ludicrous things. With that patch reverted this doesn't happen, but that's only because we don't fall back to the hard coded defaults.
I personally like meaningful hard coded value. The main question would be why do we have weird hard coded value? Is it because nobody is testing them? Or is it a choice?
My guess on thumbscroll being hardcoded to enabled is that someone working on elm for touchscreen devices/or a patch from Tizen who works on it with touchscreen devices, or something similar set thumbscroll as enabled somewhere along the way in the hardcoded default without considering the desktop use of elm. Either that or the values just have the hardcoded values but because they weren't used, they weren't tested, and no one cared.
how about removing hard-coded default and throwing a error, if elm_config fails to get system fallback finally.
I think the optimal solution to this would be to somehow directly include the eet config source for the "standard" profile in the build tree, then do an in-process compile/decompile to get the expected struct. This would mean we can permanently remove hard-coded defaults while still retaining their functionality.
The initial difficulty with this approach would be that, syntactically, C would disallow double quotes from existing naturally in a string. This means that directly using #include for this purpose will fail since the config eet uses double quotes.