I've gotten into the habit of doing pretty robust configuration panes for my modules now, and I'm finding the variable names & management to be quite the pain.

I have variables like mymodule_section_subvar_varname_type_context and I not only loose track of the order of the elements in my variable names but I feel as if having a variable name that long is a design flaw.

I've been considering using a serialized array in a variable mymodule_section_settings in conjunction with a set of functions that make it easy to maintain that array but I'd love some input in what (if any) best practices have been established outside of prefixes and/or examples of modules that we trust and what they are doing for large sets of variables.

Thanks!