Makes me laugh because I discussed in all those threads :-)
Elektra doesn't want to displace GConf. It actualy can't.
GConf provides way more benefits for desktop applications. But.... KDE programs can't access Gnome properties and vice-versa. So here comes Elektra.
Being smaller, simpler, more generic, it fits perfectly as a backend for GConf and a backend for KConfig (KDE's configuration API) at the same time. This way each framework will keep on using its own API and naming conventions, but Gnome apps will be able to access KDE's configuration atoms, and vice-versa. So we can have only one place to store global desktop things like proxy, background, default font, etc. More than that: KDE and Gnome will be able to use their own APIs to access Samba's,
X.org's, DHCP, Apache, etc configurations as those softwares were plain KDE or Gnome apps :-)