There is that, but there's also the safety factor. Changing the URL in libnickel is completely unsupported and risks bricking the device. Most threads (hopefully all, but I haven't read them all) talking about how to edit or patch Kobo-provided firmware files carries a suitable warning. The Kobo Utilities plugin, so far anyway, only does operations which we can all be reasonably certain (based on the long use of the KoboTouch driver) are quite safe. It still isn't supported, but nothing in the Kobo Utilities plugin is going to brick your device if it's done a tiny bit wrong.
That is, assuming davidfor didn't sneak in a "or os.unlink(db_file)" somewhere
