Well, perhaps we need to seperate site style settings from the stuff like that. In fact the more I think about it the more it seems like a good idea. Have a second settings hash that isnt updated every time but only read. Only user settings type nodes would need to update it. This would also improve our ability to cache as the stuff with a low change frequency would be seperated out from the stuff that changed per visit. There is also the $THEME object, which is pretty minimally used and im not sure where it fits into this picture.