I, too, would love to see a standard location for files in Linux--no matter what distro you run. I am currently running a RH 7.3 distro and doing some studying in PHP/Apache/MySQL programming. I had to figure out the location of some .conf files on my own (in order to configure those packages properly) as RH figured they didn't need to be in the standard location. Bugged the heck out of me.
You have a very valid point. RH is notorious for relocating .conf files with their new versions. The first time I set up RH 7.3 as a server for someone, I had to actually tell it to include linuxconf. 7.2 and previous versions included that by default.
I thought that was weird.