Kontact & Korganizer fail to start

I'm running Debian/Trixie on an amd64 machine. This is a fresh reinstall 
with my old Debian/Trixie home folder. The version of Debian has not 
changed in the reinstall.

There is precisely one result returned on the search for 'Kontact "A 
required background service is not operational" '

https://www.mail-archive.com/kde-bugs-dist%40kde.org/msg1028115.html

As per that complaint, the details button still doesn't work. journalctl 
-u akonadi also returns nothing. Same non-result with kontact.

Kontact does come up when I rename .config/akonadi to 
.config/akonadi.old, but I lose my calendar connections. It's a pain to 
reinstall everything but there doesn't seem to be any other way so I did it.

My real complaint is that these things seem to be too common lately. Too 
many applications seem to think they need to be hyper-vigilant over 
protecting their settings so a reinstall often fails to let the user 
carry on as if nothing had happened.

What ever happened to the Unix idea that configuration files should be 
plain text and editable by the user?