Thanks chad.king for your post - i agree this is not how it should work in a perfect world.
I just browsed the Toad World's Idea Pond and found topics from other users with some new ideas of built in variables:
http://www.toadworld.com/products/toad-data-point/i/automation/4106c00f-3506-4eeb-9d65-3967a31dd7d2
I believe your idea is related in the same manner. So for your specific issue i have created QAT-10230 task for our team to improve this in a more user-friendly and intuitive way. But for the improvement of the system variables in general i've created QAT-7323 last year so hope it will get prioritized this year (=