Given that the _target audience of the kit is new ZSH users, to avoid confusion I think that the kit should keep using ~ by default until and unless the user explicitly sets $XDG_CONFIG_HOME. I don't want to force someone who may be new to using a terminal and/or ZSH to have to figure out alternate dotfile locations before being able to use the kit - one of my goals for the kit is that a new user should be able to get it up and running in less than five minutes after they clone the repository.

All that said, I think it'd be a good idea to honor $XDG_CONFIG_HOME when it is present in the user's environment and update the kit to check to see if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set, and when it is, look for .zqs-settings, .zshrc.d and the other quickstart-created files/directories in there. Users expect to find dotfiles in~ and is where most resources will tell them to find them, so I'm going to keep that as the default location.

.fzf and .zgenom are created by upstream dependencies and I'm not going to try and update those locations - I want people to be able to use upstream documentation easily

I'm pretty busy for the next couple of weeks, but I'd definitely be willing to merge a PR that implemented it in a backwards-compatible fashion - not breaking existing users is high priority when making changes to the kit.