It's not that much those settings affecting the smarthouse application (or other applications for that matter) that I'm worried about - it's more the potential confusion caused by having some "unofficial" common terms in the main repository.

I talked with Colin and Michelle about it yesterday, and we figured that requirement from the smarthouse online simulation is that those NP sets are available on "preferences.gpii.net", is that correct? If so, we should:
1) still split this pull request into two pull request as described above. The first pull request will get merged with master, the second pull request will be added to a "review meeting" branch - which will ensure that the NP sets stays on the preferences server, even after a wipe. Post-review and pre-pilots, we will re-arrange the preferences folder a bit, and then I believe we can merge in these preferences sets into master. Does that work for you?