It's partly because I don't want to muck with a server, but
mostly because it's a system administration tool, and I don't
want people to need a running DB server to use it. In this
sense it's a design decision, I guess.
Ah, gotcha. There would only really be one DB server needed, you would just need the DB client running on the machines which need access. So, DBD::RAM or the like would be good to look into.