Yes, that’s correct. Most “Retrieved Properties” are not related to Client Settings at all; you may have thouands of Retrieved Properties (every Analysis creates Retrieved Properties, and the results of all can be seen in the Summary page for each computer - everything listed there is a Retrieved Property).
Client Settings are used in a couple of ways. Most of them change the way the BigFix Client behaves in some way - how frequently it reports, which Relay it uses, how much CPU the client service is allowed to use, etc.
The second use for Client Settings is to store custom values that we might reference in our custom fixlets or analyses. In that way, we could instead use arbitrary registry values, or entries in a file on the client, or something along those lines, but we might prefer to use Client Settings because they are easy to work with in Relevance, and work the same way across platforms; you don’t have to deal with the differences between Registry settings on Windows machines versus file entries on Linux machines, because Client Settings relevance works the same on both.
You can modify Client Settings by right-clicking computers and selecting ‘Edit Settings’, or by using an ActionScript command. The most common form of the ActionScript command would be
setting "MyCustomSetting"="MyCustomValue" on "{parameter "action issue date" of action}" for client