I'm thinking community, you're thinking for yourself or the easiest way. If you don't understand, well, I can do nothing about it. Trying to argue based on Valve "possible" update is irrelevant. The point is to decide intelligently whether hardcoding is necessary from the context. Well, could you imagine how would be AMXX without configuration files ? It would be hell to maintain and to configure. Generally, like you would want to separate CSS from HTML, you would want to separate static datas/customization from AMXX code for the sake of flexibility, shareability, and maintainability. At least for AMXX plugins, it's really useful, and even if you need to deal with files, at the end it will be become helpful. Also it's more easy for an user to modify a configuration file than recompiling a plugin.
About orpheu signatures, we need someone to create a thread regrouping all known signatures; then it would be more easy to deal with updates and having a more consistent use. But, the problem is all people are lazy or/and busy as hell, ahah.
Anyway you do what you want, it's fine (but don't use offset, tree and signatures are fine
), just depending the context, it won't be a recommended way.