Essentially, both the Component_setting and the ComponentList_setting tables are fairly generic tables that any developer can store data in for the plug-ins that are designed. You could alternative create your own tables, etc, however bvc5 has a nice built in api that makes saving your plug-in settings and retrieving the settings from those tables extremely easy. My suggestion would be to use the tables unless you are designing something that is outside of the scope of the capability of those tables.

Use the API (ComponentSettingsManager)...don't access the table directly. That way if BV Software makes an underlying table change in a future release your code will remain compatible.

No documentation as you basically get the full source code to disect it yourself. The function names are very easy to understand and it only took me about 30 minutes to disect how everything worked with a little help from intellisense.

I don't really know what type of hints you are looking for, the function names basically say it all.

I am restraining from posting detailed core info on the forum as I don't know what is supposed to be posted for people without a developer copy, however some functions are

GetSetting,
SaveSetting, etc

All Very self-explanatory.

Like bvuser wrote, it is not documented anywhere but there are several examples. Each type of plug-in is slightly different, but let's say you wanted to write a new product task. Using OverridePriceWithText as an example, you would need to complete the following steps:
<OL>
<LI>Create a new class that inherits from BVSoftware.Bvc5.Core.BusinessRules.ProductTask.
<LI>Override TaskName to return a name for your task when it appears in the list of possible tasks.
<LI>Override TaskId to return a unique ID up to 36 characters long (which is long enough for a GUID).
<LI>Override Execute to peform your task.
<LI>Override Rollback to roll back your task.
<LI>Override Clone to return a new copy of your task.
* Optionally override StepName to return the step name of your task when it appears within a workflow.
</OL>
When your class is contructed the base class will create a new ComponentSettingsManager for you, which you can access using the SettingsManager property of your class. To retrieve a specific setting you would use GetSetting (or GetBooleanSetting, etc). For example, SettingsManager.GetSetting("Step Name").

If you create an editor for your task (see my article "How to Create a BVC5 Order Workflow Task" for an example of how to create an editor for a task), then you will want to set specific settings using SaveSetting (or SaveBooleanSetting, etc).