This IS a must for v0.2 to allow proper support for orca, but a maximum blocking time would probably be a temporary 'solution'.

All the other settingshandlers are also synchronous atm (though with less obvious risks of inifitely blocking the thread) and it seems fixing this requires some rather significant changes to universal - including events fired by each settingshandler and the lifecycle manager listening to them. The integration testing is currently also expecting things to be synchronous, so this would have to be modified as well. imo can put it in, with the suggested max-wait time hack, and a big warning/todo, and then make it a priority to make the handlers asynchronous asap post v0.2 (prob. v0.3 or v0.4).