[joe_the_user]

As I hope the post you replied to shows, I'm looking for configurability at the programmatic level, not at the end, end user level. Are you saying that is going to suffer too?

Considering Canonical is currently committed to bolting Unity on top of some version of Gnome, that version is going to have to be configurable enough for such purposes. Hopefully that will be the main line of Gnome.