System Configuration vs user configuration file priority

[pagrubel]

Quincy and I had a short discussion on possibly using system configuration file for things like the container_archive path. What would the priority be.

Let's say system admins would prefer you use /scratch/user/container_archive for your container cache.
However a user prefers to use /home/user/container_archive because they know the size of their containers and only have one or two for their workflow and don't expect to exceed limit on their home directory.
In this case user config superseding system config would be preferred.

Should we implement the sys config file?