elive-welcome was the idea to centralize that (or to use a welcome window for the first live mode), maybe a bit useless in the end... (do we really need that welcome thingy? hum), by other side, distributing the configurations between that "panel" or the menus is more or less the same (maybe more intuitive from a "panel" ?), but by other side, is much faster / easier to implement from the menus (if you uninstall the configurator / application, it doesn't shows up again, that's not the case for those panels, so they will still appear and thats not good
btw remember we are in beta and that distribution can be not perfect on the menus, we should use the distribution of the ones in the stable version as a reference
finally, yes a panel can be made with the final selection of configurators, and in the same time they will appear from the menus too which are also friendly to access (and users may found it easily because they also find the applications from the same menu, so they will see the configurators), so we will have duplicated configurators (i mean, available from different places), this is a good or bad thing? 
but of course is good to remember that elive is nice offering a "different" and "beautiful experience" that we don't want to lose
api elive-welcome
i think is still working, can be used as an example, its easy to modify the launchers, but the problem (if this is a problem) is that elive should offer something more "nice and unique" like elpanel
oh wait, we are going 
with the settings stuff , maybe we need to move it to a specific thread?
hey im not a pro lol
btw im thinking to upload the project somewhere so that people can play with it or to use as an example of cinelerra
maybe in fact elpanel could look nice in the "e16 retro distro idea", since its a little more geeky concept