I'm a bit skeptical about introducing a new type of configuration file as I think it would increase complexity and potentially be confusing. (I would happily make use of a file understood by the driver itself, similar to how we do it for ISPN or Ehcache).

As these settings are simple scalar values, I feel the current mechanism suffices; It'd be a different story if there was the needed for hierarchies / nested settings, then something like YAML or JSON would be more useful.