more brainstorming + naivity: what if the settings "tree" was just a tree of dicts, and then parse the tree all at once after you are done building? would that look cleaner?
I think that would look roughly the same as your "new()" helper. I'll try to monkey with some things and see if I can come up with a prototype that looks better.
However, just splitting out the groups you had in this patch into helper methods would reduce scope on each a little, I think. I've been bad about just appending to the end of the list myself, but the drivers with good setting support are in need of some more organization, I think.
Anyway, I was just remarking because you showed up with a thousand new settings all at once, so it was just really obvious. I'd rather have the thousand settings over not of course! :)
--Dan