Yes, actually we are just respecting some serious guidelines (network and sound) and trying not to access things directly and then find conflicts with the Maemo's media engine.

Yeah, this would be indeed almost the whole equalizer thing. About the mapping to the system default, we may try doing something outside, that you can install as plugin on your own risk. As I said, there's a couple of system things on that side that we don't want to touch right now, but indeed it makes all the sense to be able to control it, we just want to avoid bigger problems (like the one we were facing, that once you set the volume, the media deamon from maemo would go there and set back to his value) what a mess : /

Anyways, this suggestion (more than a feature request) is going higher and higher on priority and if there's a clean way of doing it we will do it.

Marcelo