I was under the false assumption that assigning a table to any of the MapSettings fields needs all the fields filled in. There might be a way to correct that assumption, but that's not what caught me so flat footed.
When I took a returned 'table', attempted to modify a single field in it, and then set the whole table to the field I got it from. It errored because what I gave it was in fact userdata.
Either way, the clarification that you can assign to a field of the returned objects just fine would've been helpful.