I’ll take the liberty to cut one part (I agree with much of what you say elsewhere)

> On 9 Dec 2021, at 20:11, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> As illustrated earlier, I'd really like us to consider being a bit
> more adventurous on the CLI side. I'm convinced that a CLI for
> directly configurable hardware is doomed to be horrible no matter
> what, if you try to directly expose all QAPI configuration
> flexibilty. Whether key/value, JSON, whatever, it will become
> unmanagable on the CLI because VM hardware config is inherantly
> complicated.
> 

I absolutely agree, but reach a slightly different conclusion

> Thus my though that config files or QMP should be the only two
> places where the full power of QAPI config is exposed. Use CLI
> as just a way to interact with config files in a simple way
> with templates.

I would countenance that we choose only one place to ‘support’ an interface. Either “Yet Another Hardware Configuration Language” or QAPI. Rather than re-inventing that wheel I would simply suggest that we leave that to the relevant ‘user’ community (libvirt, whatever), who have specific requirements and/or existing solutions. Leaving QEMU itself to focus on improving QAPI (and migrating the CLI). 

Cheers
Mark.