I probably shouldn't be complaining about how Qt does its job. I think that Qt in fact does its best to minimize accessing persistent storage; I'm not entirely sure how often it syncs the in-memory representation of the settings with that on the disc (or flash in this case), but I know they avoid doing so when they can. Of course, what I really should do is to stop relying on QSettings as a crutch, and only store those values when I know the program is about to end. (Which, I guess, runs the risk of losing the data if the program exits in an unexpected manner, but that's probably a worthwhile tradeoff...)

Indeed! But really, this is the fun part; I've always thought that finding ways to accomplish a given goal with fewer instructions is probably the most enjoyable part of coding...