i thought i actually changed them...
Anyway, i am currently using sakya's default icons for status bar. so it should still make no difference.

I will mostly change some icons today to completely match with wp7 and will try to post them

Regarding transparency, it was supposed to show your desktop.
But it did not.

I looked at the code and as per my understanding, we send out an dbus message to the system that that the screen is unlocked and thats when the system activates the hildon desktop.

So unless we make the system feel like it already unlocked the screen, we cant achieve this. But if we send a wrong message to system saying the screen is unlocked, it automatically activates your hildon desktop meaning there wil be no lockscreen to unlock.
So i dont see how we can achieve this.

Then again i am not a dev so i might be wrong,