...I personally find it kind of ugly and washed-out, and everything looks unclickable. Surely I can't be the only one who thinks this o.o
Would it be possible to just make the monochrome icons optional?
Just to clarify that I'm Paulo, I'm designing the icons.
I agree with you that is a little hard to distinguish the inactive icons from the active ones. When I saw the new release I perceived that the inactive icons are not different enough, so they need to be a bit more transparent. That's something that probably will be fixed in the next releases. Despite the mockups I made, this is the first time I'm seeing the icons applied to the interface too. So there's still some tweaks that needs to be made.
Regarding grayscale icons being ugly that's very subjective. Everyone have a different opinion on what beauty is, so it's impossible to please all. However if a considerable amount of users find it unpleasant we will definitely take measures to change it once we have the required resources available.
I also made a skin proposal to go along with the new icons, but Ashley pointed me that there's a lot of technical difficulties that would make it extremely time consuming to implement it right now. So it will be postponed to a future time.
I also proposed to put all the icons in a single strip to make it easy to manage and accommodate future changes. It would save lots of time for me not having to export hundreds of images, and for Ashley not having to import hundreds of them. Again, there's technical difficulties that make it hard (if not impossible) to implement such features. The scenario in the background is not as close to the ideal as we would like it to be. I guess this would also be the base to enable the user to customize the icons. I can't speak for Ashley, but I guess it's not viable right now.