On the other hand: this API under its various names is already widely-supported both by (non-GNOME) apps, and by widely-used desktop environments – a virtuous cycle. In particular, several third-party, non-free apps like Dropbox which are partially or totally
unusable without a status notifier already support it. (Not to make this all about Dropbox – it's just an app I use that falls into the "totally unusable" category.)
I'm sure it's not as simple as "copy
https://github.com/ubuntu/gnome-shell-extension-appindicator into the gnome-shell tree" – though it seems to work fine after a few days' testing – but supporting and improving this API would at least mean that many existing apps would behave as intended by their developers without needing to be changed (immediately).
If the answer to status icons is to adopt/adapt the appindicator API, I'm also fine with that; a bunch of applications do use it, since it's basically Ubuntu integration, and apparently "Linux == Ubuntu" for some vendors.
Of course, a lot of the crappy "let's inspect GtkMenu at run time and serialize it over DBus assuming nothing preserves state on top of the menu/menu items" needs to go, and we need to handle the GMenu serialization. But we're still back to the issue of: we need to port applications.
Ciao,
Emmanuele.
