Maybe it's just me, but I always thought 16k-plus /etc/hosts file was a kludge of a solution to a problem. In-browser adblockers are a much more effective and less resource intensive way to handle the problem. Or set up a proxy on your network that filters ads and known malware sites. Distributing and maintaining a massive hosts file just seems like a 1980s/early '90s solution to the problem.

Also, I like to run Apache, PHP and MySQL on my machines. Having all those ad servers in my /etc/hosts files slowed down page loading, and threw 404 errors all over web pages with blocked ads, unless I made a custom blank 404 error page. Once again, a kludge that slowed things down.

Now that Chrome's adblock works like Firefox's and actually stops the ads from loading (previous versions loaded then hid them), and now that Safari officially has extensions (one of which I assume is a good adblocker), I can't see any good reason to block ads via /etc/hosts.

If you frequent /etc, this is not a kludge, it's just another configuration.

Plainly you've never seen a dhcpd.conf file with more than a dozen lines...

Huge/complex/whatever config files on a server are one thing...maintaining it on your desktop seems another thing, IMHO.