I agree with you that my private environment information (which is alarmingly similar to what you described) is not very relevant for the cron job. In my case, however, I am working on a product where there are close to a 100 "public" env variables which are used widely in every program (they are stored in a different .cshrc file which is sourced by my private one).
Therefore, the idea of updating a separate file each time I need to use a different env variable seems like a recipe for mistakes.
So, do you think there is there an "in-between" solution or do we agree to disagree?