Note that I have already fixed the bar in the default iconset as of 0.13.

Your script sounds like an excellent idea though. I agree with you on almost everything there... The 0/1 indexing mixmatch is a legacy issue that annoyed me but I never got around to fixing. I think I'll go ahead and blame GA for that one, since he doesn't get nearly enough blame around here (and, well, he's not ME, which is the point of blame, isn't it? :P).

Also, separating the mute away from the volume number would be good, and I could impliment that (along with symlinks as you suggested for all of the current icon themes until the work can be done to update them) fairly quickly. I will tentatively put that in my TODO for a 0.14 release.

There is actually an iconset idea I had that I have been putting off just because of the immense amount of time required to put them together in photoshop/gimp, but I will whip it up really quickly (yes, REALLY QUICKLY! WOO!) with this script and test it out.

And really, 0.13 should be along VERY soon, we've been delaying due to a few random internal issues as well as 770 support, which I really don't want to push to 0.14, since we're so very close!