If you review the latest code for existing features you'll see that in most of them we have wrapped up all the settings into a class where we pass in the hashtable of settings to the contstructor and get all the settings onto properties to make them easier to use. For example if you look at the code for the Contact Form you will see we use ContactFormConfiguration.cs
If you create an instance of it like
ContactFormConfiguration config = new ContactFormConfiguration();
it will have the default vlaues for settings and if you pass in the settings hashtable like
ContactForm Configuration config = new ContactFormConfiguration(Settings);
it will override the defaults with the feature instance values.
This is just a way to make the code cleaner and more re-usable if the custom feature has supporting pages where you also need the settings.
Hope that helps,
Joe