I think it's bad manners to act like if the author owed you something. Redis is a monumental personal effort, and a lot of people try to help in many different ways because they are grateful such a tool exists. If you want to improve Redis, you are welcome to discuss any issue and even provide a patch, but you have to be respectful. A comment like yours is very demoralizing for open source contributors.
Hi mrmondo, I respect your opinion, but I think this is really a matter of individual design taste.
I think that persisting the mutable state in the configuration file is a good thing, since actually in the Sentinel case, the initial configuration is the statement of a given state. As the state evolves it is reflected in the configuration.
The version of Sentinel provided with 2.8.7 also provides a full API that allows to change the configuration while the system is running, so you can automate everything without even having to touch the configuration file at all if you don't like it.
There are so many issues with sentinels they really are still a hacked together afterthought just to try and tick off a few reliability boxes.