I fully agree and that’s why I tend to having the two modes co-exist: All textual as people are used to do it with OH1 for power users and a “I am not a programmer and I just want the stuff to work” simply mode for beginners (with possibly reduced possibilities). The question is really where to draw the line best and how to enable beginners becoming power users. I think an export of discovered things to a thing file is definitely something that makes sense and should not be too hard to implement. But reflecting any possible configuration in the shell or a UI in a nicely structured and formatted config file is not really feasible.
Note that there are no priorities of the project itself. It evolves by people contributing code to it. And the majority of contributions to ESH in the past two years is about setup and configuration of the system through UIs.