As it turns out I ended up just copying confconsole.py into the first boot inithook folder and adjusting and reusing some it's functions to read and set the networking options.

As you'd know by now I'm not much of a programer and I don't really know what I'm doing, but I'm persistent and not scared to get my hands dirty. It still doesn't work exactly how I'd like and in some respects it's perhaps overkill, but it looks nice and it's a good start I reckon.