The reason is a long story so I won't bore you all.
The basics are thus:
I need to add a new pane to the checkout form to gather some new data.
But if the customer isn't a specific type (i.e. frequent buyer) the new pane should not show up.
I think I'm doing this correctly where if the user object doesn't have the correct attribute the new pane just returns false.
If that is totally wrong, please let me know.