Reconsider current use of confin and confout files
From my perspective, the potential pitfalls (incorrect error bars, waste of CPU time) of the current way the configuration files are handled outweigh any advantages I can think of.
On the present occasion, problems arose for the following nontrivial reason: although I used the example job file that includes a call to out_to_in.sh, things failed because the script file did not have the right permissions (as can easily happen when copying files to a new location). The problem remained completely hidden because the output of out_to_in.sh is piped to /dev/null.