This feels a little like the elephant in the room no one is talking about. One of the most excellent things about Blender is that it is updated so frequently. The downside is moving preferences around (or forgetting to) manually.
Are people still expected to deal with this by hand, or are there easier ways? Windows optionally stores user preferences to the user profile so that updating doesn't start you at a blank state again. It works well enough for me, but I can see how there is a potential for collisions if the structure of the files changes from version to version.
a screenshot of my ~/Library/Application Support/Blender
