To me the point is that wpa_supplicant is hard to configure. In the old
days, one just specified a nwid and key. Now, WPA2 is more complicated
than WEP, but from the usual user viewpoint it's mostly the same thing:
a network name and a password. So it would be really nice if it could
be configured that simply.
I have the feeling wpa_supplicant exists as a process with a config file
partly because some of the things it can do are complicated, and partly
because of structuring the code to be like the entities in the standard.