I'm lacking the technical knowledge, but perhaps you can customize the Maemo 5 UI providing alternative Hildon layouts that the interested users could download and install.

This way you avoid extra settings officially supported (with the extra hassle this bring to UI design and testing) and users willing to depart from the defaults can get what they wish anyway.

As said, I don't know enough about Hildon to tell whether this is technically possible or not. This is how far my Sunday post gets.