well the thing is you would not change the settings very often, or ever,
maybe the settings are set when the address is created, cannot be changed
even if there was a password of some sort you wouldn't need it on your computer
i think security and redundancy go together quite well
besides the security, i think there are heaps of cool things you can do with that
edit - i for one would like to be less reliant on cold storage, it just makes things inconvenient.
this is like a middle ground between cold storage
You seem to be missing the point. Once your wallet.dat file is compromised, then your attacker can just load it in one of the many existing Bitcoin clients. And you can't hardcode those suggested "features" into the wallet.dat file itself without making it incompatible with other Bitcoin clients. Hackers can hack both wallet.dat files and Bitcoin clients. Those are 2 different things.