Fixing corrupt .plist files

I'm wondering if anybody has figured this out yet:
Mavericks does some different things with .plist files, and the traditional fix of trashing the .plist that is in ~/Library/Preferences no longer works for fixing a corrupt .plist.
The .plist files are now cached, perhaps in ~/Library/Caches.
I found this page that addresses the issue: objective c - Deleting plist file does not reset app on Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks - Stack Overflow
Out of my own curiosity I tried trashing a .plist file from ~/Library/Preferences and then force quitting the cfprefsd process (mine, not root's), and then restarting, but the .plist file was not regenerated. It remained absent from ~/Library/Preferences. So I restored it from the trash.
Has anyone figured this out?

It's a very good question regarding plists generally. You may have seen Apple's mention of it, although the caching seems much more agressive in Mavericks, & eg Safari requires quitting cfprefsd, or a restart (logging out/in isn't enough) for removing/replacing the plist file to have any effect, here anyway.
In 10.8 and later, the CFPreferences agent process (cfprefsd) will cache information from these files and asynchronously write to them. This means that directly modifying plist files is unlikely to have the expected results (new settings will not necessarily be read, and may even be overwritten). You should use the NSUserDefaults or CFPreferences APIs, or the defaults(1) command, to interact with the preferences system.

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