ProfessorI don't think so, but perhaps. global status should have current statistics and variables should have static settings. Could be wrong, of course.
As far as the DP versus property issue, yeah, I have run into this before. We wanted to be able to reference a property in widgets and you simply can't, so we had to create a datapoint from the property (this is to be able to display resource commit usage for our clients). So, we have a DS applied to collectors that only has complex groovy datapoints with the value ##property## for each. Rough edges :).
