Without qualification you are contradicting yourself in that remark. Unless you are running RealTime which holds the configuration details in a database then Asterisk is using text files because that is what the .conf files are. In order to edit those files you need a text editor such as nano or word pad.
No, it is not. It is a telephony toolkit. You can use different programming languages with Asterisk but outside of the extensions.conf you aren’t doing anything “programmatic” with the configs.
While this is a round about and kinda off topic way of doing it, the actual design for FreePBX is a touchy topic. If you are looking to have FreePBX be how it is generally referred to “a management GUI for Asterisk” then it is not really a PBX. Unfortunately, that has been a flaw for FreePBX (to me) as compared to other PBX systems in the market FreePBX is lacking. The notion that it just needs to let you edit the Asterisk configs then it is not really a PBX but a config GUI because as I said before Asterisk is a toolkit. Not a programming language and not a PBX. It needs to be made into a PBX.
In other PBX systems if you want to enable TLS you just enable TLS. You don’t have to go and enable/set multiple settings per extension. It’s just on/off. Same with other features. The PBX doesn’t require the user to have intricate knowledge of the underlying voice engine because it does the work. Also there are numerous things PBX systems do that have nothing to do with the voice engine part of it.
For me, FreePBX needs to get away from being more of an Asterisk config editor and more to being a traditional PBX.