Actually, pretty much on topic - well spotted! That's exactly where that came from, all the way down to the coordinates I also wrote a 40 kilobyte intro with the same effects - a city scape could be taken from there :P

I'm afraid there's a disagreement over what "most of us" means in this context. I don't know if that's correct even when "us" means talk.maemo.org users, but Home Screen Settings is really targeted for ALL N9 users. I know for a fact that most N9 users will not and should not modify any system files.

There are two problems here.

First of all, software packages should not modify files provided by other packages. Home Screen Settings does not replace any files provided by any of the Harmattan packages. The Debian packaging system prevents this for a reason. If packages modify files owned by other packages no one really owns the files and the consistency of the files can not be guaranteed.

Secondly, even though something can be done it doesn't mean that it should be done. Packages can modify files owned by other packages but that leads to the same situation described above. When done wrong, it leads to problems. This was already exhibited by a badly written package for which Home Screen Settings incorrectly got negative feedback about, which really was not that nice. A dirty hack can do this but anyone installing such a hack needs to be aware of the implications.

Technically the key thing here is that the Harmattan system theme is "blanco", which inherits "base". If an application has a base theme but no blanco theme, the base theme can be overridden by providing a blanco theme. However, if the application already provides a blanco theme (like sysuid does), overriding is not possible without modifying files provided by the application, which in turn should not be done since it leads to problems.

Anyone is free to modify their own system. Anyone is free to use a hack like N9 Tweak to modify their system. However, these modifications come with a requirement to understand what they may cause. Home Screen Settings provides a safe way to change certain things without risking system stability. I really would like to keep it that way and I appreciate everyone's understanding of such a choice. Home Screen Settings will continue to provide interesting home screen improvements without breaking anyone's system