Thanks for quoting me Matt!
Your idea was indeed a good one, and the way Pentax implemented it looks good too. I didn't test it very extensively, but first impression is that it works fine.
Setting the dial to USER the LCD lights up and shows the saved settings in the active mode. The first field of this screen is selected so changing to another USER mode only requires going into the list selector for that field and selecting the other mode.
From what I saw the name you can give to the USER mode can be pretty long, well... quite a bit longer then the standard USER-1 anyway. Saving and renaming is done in the menu I seem to remember.
Wim