Hi!
gnome-applets are one of reasons why gconf is not removed fully. They are still using gconf. There are patches available to port to gsettings, but I dont know if patches are available for all applets.
Our maintainer/maintainers have not responded here for a long time. I wanted / I was ready to spend my time to improve gnome-panel, but they are not even responding to questions. Also from Philipp view I have created just big mess in master...
So now I am not trying to do anything upstream, but when I have time I am working with forked versions in github.
