subscribed as well, a video with some info would be great. I am definitely no developer, but not afraid to mess around a bit. I was also interested in making similar changes as OP.
In fact I am using Jerick's smooth sense mod with white letter mod by squintz, and a couple of the icons were coming up out of order. I was not cool enough to be able to repair the info that points to an icon so I found the icons in framework-res.apk and changed the names of them so that I would get the correct icon in status bar. But obvously that is not the correct fix. However this is where the icons OP is talking about. So if I can make a name change to a png can't you also replace that png. I believe that the apk has to be signed correctly after manipulating?
Anyways any basic info about doing such would be greatly appreciated