This trac ticket by John James Jacoby proposes to make wp-settings.php a series of action calls instead of being, “a mishmash of globals, function calls, class instantiations, and do_action() calls”. The proposal makes sense to me, particularly for the reasons John spells out in the ticket description:
“By breaking
wp-settings.phpup into many clearly nameddo_action()calls, it becomes clearly obvious what actions perform what duties, while also introducing literally maximum flexibility in the entire system for new and exciting things to happen around WordPress itself.”
I think his WordSesh talk may be along these lines as well.
