@Carl-
I guess in the desire to build an automated application (cause let's be honest, how cool is it when you have a config file that controls how the application inits, am I right?), it seems you are where I might be heading. I just didn't want to have to resort to static simplicity due to the fact that I couldn't comprehend a built-in function or how ColdFusion's mapping worked.
I did consider the performance hit from doing the XML parsing every route. In my application, after the initial heavy load of the startup, on each request, the pseudo runs a:
Config.processAppPseudo()
This iterates over a private structure variable in the object that contains all the key/value pairs (previously pulled from XML) and simply executes a <cfset structInsert( this, keyName, keyValue, true ) /> in a loop. It's overhead, but an acceptable level I feel. And if need be, I could have part of the startup BUILD a file dynamically created that has all the this-scope declarations. To me, I just wanted any automated solution that did not resort in me hard-coding the variables.