I was thinking of moving date and time over into the topmenu, and then removing the clock on the status bar altogether. That would give space for more things.
If we then hack the status bar to support “drop in configurations”, people could instead of making separate patches just write stuff to put into that drop-in place, like icons for all kinds of things. 
Similar to how jolla-settings (and some components of that) do it.
I.e. one patch to enable that, and many(?) authors to add status stuff to that patches area.