Business workflow engines are a special case of this, with the defining qualities that a) it's something you do intentionally, and b) humans are supposed to be "in the loop".
I am not convinced whether workflow engines are genius or pure evil yet. You can certainly perpetrate evil with them, but that's true of anything.
In the days when people were calling it 'meta-level architecture' there was this sense that highly configurable systems were defined by what you couldn't configure. If everything was configurable, it was a bloody mess.
I am not convinced whether workflow engines are genius or pure evil yet. You can certainly perpetrate evil with them, but that's true of anything.