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The idea is simple and just design eyecandy:

Situation: we have a system tray area in the taskbar that very much has the look and feel of its windows pendant. This is not up to date, not stylish, not even very useful.

proposal main: would be much nicer to have the running 'things' seamless 'on' the taskbar like Mac OS-X has and recently also Gnome does it. Just black/white, directly on the taskbar, no border, seamless. Very stylish. (b/w, or plasma shade colors could be a simple option, that makes icons b/w or grayscale or plasma style replacing the original colors - that would be cool!)

proposal part 2: that means, there are only icons on the taskbar that really have a reasonable function, e.g. represent a program that completely runs in the background and does need a handle to have the user communicate with it.
Meaning: No senseless tray-icons like Opera that simply wants to show that it's there, but at the same time has a immense window for user interaction.
Still: Functionality to show/don't show switching for every icon is already in the tray applet, so, just stick with that...

"Meaning: No senseless tray-icons like Opera that simply wants to show that it's there, but at the same time has a immense window for user interaction. Still: Functionality to show/don't show switching for every icon is already in the tray applet, so, just stick with that..."

I'm not quite sure what you're proposing. On one hand, you're proposing that the systray shouldn't be needlessly cluttered (which I agree with). On the other hand, you recognize there is a system in place that lets the user decide what should be in the systray (or an equivalent) and what should not.

Am I right when I think what you want is a more strict set of guidelines/rules of what should be running in the systray by default? That is, if one wants the Opera icon or the OpenOffice quicklauncher one (to just use two examples that may be convenient but not necessary) the user should explicitly turn it on rather than it being the default?

yes and no.

ok, my main idea is very very simple: let's remove the border around the system tray and let it seamlessly (just the optical design) integrate into the taskbar. This is just eyecandy.

Then I thought: ok, if you do this, you should still be able to decide which trayicon is visible an which is not. So I added proposal part 2 that simply says: the possiblity to make unwanted or useless icons invisible or not appearing in default view should be still there. Thats all. Very simple.

Well, both things are possible even now - use/create a plasma theme that doesn't have the border around systray, and hide icons you want to hide.

Moved to pre-existing since it's already do-able.