It would help you a lot if you kept a blog about how all your design exploration progresses. Later you could point people to that and say: "see, there's a process behind it". Not to mention that it would save a lot of time for those coming after you in the future.
>In the end however, I was faced with an ultimatum. Do I change the settings app JUST to look different than OS X, and lose out on the well-established excellence of Apple's design?
Which can be rephrased as: I'm a hack and could think of no original ideas of my own, so I opted to copy another OS verbatim.
Thankfully Apple doesn't think that way not even for their own design -- they improve (or at least attempt to) OS X's design with each release. And they have even more excuses than you to rest on their laurels (namely, that the laurers are theirs to begin with).
