What's interesting is that this actually represents the point in time where the NeXT people in charge started to realize that they didn't know everything and stopped resenting the idea that some of the classic Mac ideas were actually valuable to developers.
Prior to 10.3, there was no really adequate built-in replacement for some use cases of the classic Mac OS Resource Manager. You either compiled sqlite into your Mac app or used some often inferior solution. Sometimes plists were better! Sometimes really not, even with all of the limits of the classic Resource Manager.