externalization headache

It seems that lately I am suffering because of a top secret between me and god, 6 months back I architected the project in which I suggested lot of externalization, well yeah I was not wrong externalization if possible is always good for big monsters, but this one seems to be asking for more of maintenance effort than I can see its advantages, now even a small change require me to make sure that corresponding exernalization module is also sync'd, and this externalization is used till now ONLY once, and trust me those configuration files are getting really a issue by development team(not me :-) ) and it really worries me sometimes that whole thing might come down one day, I wish meta data feature of tiger was released in mantis than I would have been really able to keep this effort real less, And this time I would have surely tried my dream feature, meta tag with XPath, let me describe it little bit here, as most of the file size of configuration goes in describing mapping location, how about keeping a unique id with meta-tag and specify its corresponding xpath location with it ... sounds like a dream to me, I would really love to see if anyone has done anything like that yet, I can think of doing this by putting a preprocessor before compile, but I believe than there is no way we can avoid recompilation, than is it worth even doing the externalization :-) ?