Re. point (a): The configuration logic assumes that if you put things in
the configuration file, you want them included - that means
instantiating handlers, which will generally open their output files
(uness the delay parameter is set) and sockets. If you use append
semantics for files and configure levels as you want them, the files are
opened but not written to (and closed when the handlers are closed or
the application exits). This is not a bug, as it was designed to work
like this.

Re. point (b): Agreed that the presence of the sections may not seem
necessary as you could achieve the same with loggers=, handlers= etc.
The sections were originally placed there as a place to hang other
settings which could apply across loggers, handlers etc. - which never
materialised. In any case, it's not a big problem and not worth breaking
backward compatibility for. The qualname is not always the same as the
value in the section header - see the documentation for an example of
this, search for "compiler.parser". The values in e.g. the section
header and the handlers= section are just names to allow the
configuration to cross-refer different parts of the configuration - so
you could use h1, h2 etc. as handler names.

Re. point (c): there are alternative ways of configuring logging; for
one example, see http://www.red-dove.com/python_config.html and look at
"logconfig.cfg" and "logconfig.py" in the linked tarball/zip.