form_validation.php in config and conditional validation rules

I have made a CRM in CodeIgniter that I am working on improving, and want to move all the form validation rules to a form_validation.php file in the config folder.

This is not an improvement. Every developer who has to look at those forms later will hate you for essentially obfuscating the validation logic for them.

I was wondering about that. But the form is very long, and I thought that removing the many validation rules to their own file would streamline the methods and make them more readable. I am quite willing to keep them the way they are, if that is the lesser of two evils.