I see your point man and I agree. I just think it took me too long to learn how a concept like hooks work. In doing so I think that the documentation could be more thorough
Something like this would have helped me immensely:
The function you associate with this hook in the extension takes $out as a parameter :
//When this function is called, the html of the control panel is passed in as a parameter
//which you can then manipulate
function the_function_associated_with_the_hook_in_extension_settings( $out ){
//Do something with the html
//Return your modified control panel html to be displayed
return $out;
}