I never knew the
~/.local/share thing was a convention hehe. The number of applications following it is so infinitely minuscule. And there is
~/.config too.
I never understood why they did not simply replicate the system's hierarchy, for example
~/etc for the configuration files. I find
~/mnt and
~/bin very useful.
Now, the maintainers could make patches that would replace all
$HOME/.appname/config instances with
$HOME/.local/share/appname/config or whatever, like they do for other things when they port the application.
This is really a mess, but see the bright side: we have no binary registries that span tens of MBs.