It’s certainly possible to have the raw code available. NaturesWitness did that for me when he was getting started making the MA traits. Came in handy for wiki work too.
Problem is, editing it without compiling accomplishes nothing to change the executable’s performance. Every time I changed the numbers when getting the hibernation settings set (I’m thinking I should’ve tweaked it some more… :-/ ) I had to recompile.
That’s why JSON stuff is so important: you only have to re-run the executable, not recompile the source, in order for changes to take effect.