This sounds like lot of fun.

I guess dropping support for status icons in Gtk is legitimate option, as that's how the Gnome authors envision it and how they want it.

But as a KDE user, I would prefer if there were still APIs and tools in U++ to handle status icons normally.

But U++ is GTK3 based now, so ... I don't know. Maybe the X11 without GTK branch only to keep them supported and GTK3 branch to ignore any U++ API calls?

Seems quite awkward situation to me, I definitely like existence of status icons in the task bar in my desktop environment, and if some app is overusing it, I can uninstall the particular app. But I don't understand Gnome design decisions for many years, so this is just another one, I simply think completely differently about my computer "desk".