Because using .cfg special characters as values is a terrible idea:

• = doesn't work as a single hotkey
• , never works at all, it's a hotkey list separator
• + and " would've never worked as well but were strategically avoided even though there are - and '
• some other chars like \ only work by the miracle of a weird ini parser
• COMMA and "=" only work once before it rewrites config with broken variants
• there is BACKQUOTE
• there is NUM_MINUS as well as - even though they're the same character (because they are supposed to be key codes, not characters).

So, IMO, the only way out of this mess is to use key names everywhere. Unfortunately, characters will also have to be kept, at least for a while, to convert old configs.