GNOME griefs - gnome-theme-manager

There are a few things about GNOME that have really been bugging me. I'll be posting my problems with them here, as they come to me. Tonight, I start with everyone's favorite, the GNOME theme manager.
This piece of junk has been buggy since GNOME 2.0. A long time outstanding bug is #102216 (icon themes install into ~/.themes instead of ~/.icons). It looks like Luis has marked this as a milestone bug for GNOME 2.10, though I still feel its about 4 minor GNOME releases too late.
Also, just recently, the theme-manager has started eating 100% of my CPU when it starts up. It looks like its trying to generate its theme previews, and while its doing so, it manages to make itself completely useless. It doesn't redraw its UI, but is still running. It responds to mouse clicks in the ListView and on the Buttons. I have to use gconf-editor to change my theme. Davyd just told me about "themes://" in Nautilus, but that's even worse. It generates its cute little thumbnails pretty quickly, but I can't actually use the themes in there. Double-clicking on them does nothing, and I can't change individual GTK, Metacity or Icon themes.
And on top of that, the recently released Smooth engine 0.6 seems to cause some problems with the theme-manager's thumbnail generation. Causes them all the be question marks, and sometimes even does the "eat all my CPU" thing.
And don't even get me started on the irritating Metatheme idea. I've never been a fan of that, and thought it was a bad idea to move in that direction (though I admit it does fit in with the "simplifying GNOME" goal). I think I'll have to write a decent theme switcher for those of us who are heavy theme users. With options to edit the current theme if its a Gtk or Metacity theme, to reload the current theme (so you don't have to switch to one, and then back again). Yes indeed, that sounds like a swell idea.