What's the closest thing to a clean reinstall of OS X

I was thinking... if I want to "reset" OS X Mavericks, how can I do this without actually doing a clean reinstall (i.e. by erasing the disk and then installing a fresh copy)? I'm interested separately in:
1. Resetting all the app preferences and "traces of use", so that they look and behave exactly as when downloaded from the App Store (or after a fresh install, if they're "built in" OS X, like Preview, Mail etc.) and
2. Resetting all the system preferences to a "straight out of the box" form.
Thanks.

Any new account takes on all default settings. So all desktop and system settings will be "out of box" configuration. Any apps will also behave in a default manner since (example) TextEdit has never been launched under that account. So it doesn't matter how you had it configured under your normal account. The new account will use TextEdit's defaults. Apps themselves will remain on the drive. The only reason a given app wouldn't is if, for whatever reason, you installed something into your user account.
Any third party fonts will disappear with the old account since by default, they get copied to the Fonts folder in your user account when installed through Font Book. All other fonts installed by OS X will remain where they are.
There are a handful of system settings which are not saved in the user account, but they're minor. Cache files are mostly stored in the each user account, so those will disappear with the deletion of the previous admin account.
There are utilities to also clear out leftover system cache files, but it isn't really necessary to do that.
Important! Make sure the new account is created as Administrator. It is possible to delete an admin account while logged into a standard account as long as you know the admin login name and password. That would leave only a standard account on the Mac. It would be impossible then to install any software or allow changes requiring an admin password, and you can't create an admin account from a standard user account when there is no other admin account to enter the password of.

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