While I like your original suggestion, the idea of always having the pulley menu indicator visible is very bad because it would confuse users.
When the user sees the pulley menu indicator, they know to pull down (or up, in the case of bottom pulleys) to access the menu.
If you show the pulley menu indicator in the middle of a list, the user will pull down and the pulley menu will not appear.
That would be very VERY bad for the user experience of Sailfish.
There are many user interface improvements badly needed in Sailfish, many of them already suggested on this forum (including by me), but there is no interest to implement such improvements probably because there are no resources inside Jolla for such changes, since there are bigger, more fundamental issues which Jolla is and will be struggling with for the forseable future.