Is a “master preferences” class a good idea?

Question

I have a class that manages user preferences for a large software project. Any class in the project that may need to set or retrieve a user preference from a persistent store i

Answer 1

Can't you just handle preferences in a really generic way? You'd then just use the preference manager to handle the persistence. So from a class you'd just say to the preference manager PreferenceManager.setPreference(key, value) and it doesn't care what it's saving in terms of the semantics of the data.

Or am I simplifying this too much?