How to get attributes that are dictionaries?

How can I get an attribute that is stored as a dictionary?

I have a panel. After lots of careful tweaking I got a color that's very pleasing to me. I want to use that color elsewhere in my patch. I figured I would use [getattr] to get the 4 value list that I could pass around to anything else that I wanted to match to that color. But [getattr] doesn't output anything. If I use the inspector to "create a message box with this attribute's current value" I get "bgfillcolor dictionary."

Okay, so panel colors are stored as dictionaries. I read a bit about dictionaries. Dictionaries look neat! I thought maybe if I hook up a [dict.view] to [getattr] I'd be able to see the attributes values. But alas, it still is empty.

So... the question remains? How can I get the values of attributes that are stored as dictionaries?

I know there are ways, for example I could open the patch as a text file and find the values that ways. But if I want to manage these attributes programmatically I need to be able to get them within the program.

Thanks for any tips.