[...]
this is mainly because ~/.pdsettings works differently from .pdrc (which just had one-cmdline-arg per line). instead, .pdsettings uses key/value pairs with the "keys" being predefined and not corresponding to any cmdline args, so "autopatch: 0" is not a valid setting here (and "noautopatch" or "-noautopatch" are totally not). luckily you can specify cmdline-args in the "flags" section, so having "flags: -noautopatch" should do what you want.
Thank you! This indeed works!
best, P