fall cleaning

I keep trying to hack on required config validation and getting sucked into a bunch of clean up...

So, this time I figured I'd actual get my changes up in a PR instead of just letting them linger in my fork, waiting to be forgotten about.
Did you see the commit message on 5d6948495e7f059619887c5b37e87d48b99afa1d ?

Happy to discuss more if that doesn't answer it for ya.