@ajweiss Sounds good to me, that has always been the precedence order for settings, but it's surprisingly hard to get right for the datadir. Don't forget that in the case of the GUI there's a  `2.5) Datadir from QSettings`

And for `-conf` the precedence order is different and depends on `-datadir` being specified on the command line:
1) Command line argument `-conf`
2) bitcoin.conf in `-datadir` IF that option is provided on command line  
3) bitcoin.conf in default datadir

...a `-datadir` in the configuration file will obviously not have an effect on `-conf` :)