I am not sure I follow you

perhaps skype is a better medium for figuring each other out.... but I will try to clarify what I think the question is centered around.
The component configuration for any given component is a common grouping of configurable options. You can set these and they are the base settings that govern how the component will act.
For any given menu item you are presented again with the component configuration (in a separate slider) that is pre-populated with your base component configuration. You can modify the component configuration for this menu item however you choose. For any request of the site that uses this Itemid (menu item) as a base, the component configuration defined in the menu item takes precedence over the base component configuration.
For any request of the site that does NOT include an Itemid thus not defining an active menu item, the component will revert to using the base component configuration. It is also worth noting that if you were to use the component logic in another setting such as XML-RPC the base component configuration would be used as well.
Individual articles also have the ability to re-define certain characteristics such as show/hide pdf icon, etc. No matter the base component configuration or the menu item configuration an individual article's settings will always take precedence and override component/menu configuration. This is an approach that allows cascading configuration options from the broadest scope down to the most fine grained scope
There are also for any given menu item parameters that are specific to that menu item. While working through this I endeavored to reduce the number of these as much as possible. The idea is to create as much simplicity as possible by moving long lists of choices that are rarely modified into a place out of view. There were a great number of parameters in several places that were never used. Those are now gone. I consolidated a few others, and renamed nearly all of them to have semantic meaning in the code.
I hope that clears some of it up... happy to answer questions and am available on skype if you want to go in depth

I am sure there are some bugs, but this had to happen before beta 2 or it was not going to happen and also most of the bugs stem from the name changes of parameters. If you re-save most things which then sets the correct parameter names, most everything works.
Louis
_________________
Development Working Group Coordinator
http://webimagery.net - Consulting
http://jxtended.com - Solutions for Joomla! 1.5
A hacker does for love what others would not do for money.