LOCATION is an attribute of ogc_server_settings object (passed thru via __getattr__ to the dictionary for 'default' OGC_SERVER in settings.py directly).  'public_url' is a property defined w/ @property decorator.  I suppose all of the properties could be changed to uppercase, or  property accessor functions could be added for each dict value in an OGC_SERVER with lowercase names for each.  Those are the two options that come to mind.  The properties are useful because they can contain logic for determining value to return (eg datastore_db, ows, public_url)