Mike Pilato and I have been kicking around some ideas on server dictated configuration recently and have put our thoughts into a wiki (full disclosure: this wiki was initially based on Hyrum's thoughts on the subject in https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk/notes/repos-dictated-config) :
http://wiki.apache.org/subversion/ServerDictatedConfiguration We're at a point where it's time to solicit some wider feedback, so please have a look at the wiki and follow-up here with any concerns, thoughts, suggestions, etc.. Paul