We've developed a plugin which allows non-administrators to change admin-level settings at the category level. https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?id=677

Currently one of the limitations which prevents a relatively clean implementation of this functionality is the use of $CFG in a number of plugins.

Our method involves modifying get_config/set_config methods allowing them to check a 'category settings' table based off of the config/config_plugins tables.

In order to make this work we've had to modify the core plugins anywhere $CFG-> is used and change to the get_config version.

We'd like to get this started as a discussion as there may be issues with doing this we haven't discovered yet. For instance get_config does cause a lookup instead of a memory access which of course could mean performance degradation.
We have already gone through and modified all the core modules and can provide the changes if this is accepted.