[CentOS] sssd and authconfig and ldap database lookups

So I am feeling rather frustrated with sssd today:

1. I see that when you install sssd (this is centos 6), sssd.conf is
not created. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Deployment_Guide/about-sssd.conf.html
implies that if I want to use sssd I need to create the sssd.conf file
first. Any reason why?

2. I also noticed if sssd.conf is not there, authconfig won't create
it even if you tell it to --enablesssd. How so? I thought that if you
are using sssd, it would have stuff like kerberos and ldap (to pick a
couple of examples) configured there.

3. It seems if I want to, say, define ldap_user_search_base I must do
it directly in sssd.conf instead of passing some kind of argument to
authconfig. Am I correct? If so, which files does authconfig affect? I
thought it was the *proper* way to  configure all the authentication
thingies so to make sure they all played together. But, it seems that
you have to configure sssd.conf and then use authconfig... or not.

Brain hurts