I seem to recall catorise had a memory leak, which is why I never used it. Some functionality could I imagine be integrated as an toggle option within Hildon for allowing grouping by application type as is done in other desktops like xfce (Office, Games, System etc).

Have you tried any SDL2 builds yet? I had a partial port for Fremantle but had problems building for GLES1 and GLES2, I had to choose one or the other.