Independence of widget/GTK and icon themes

[Andrew Conkling]

With all the recent talk of icon theme specs on the xdg-list, here's an
idea I posted on the gtk-list with no replies:

One thing that would really rock my socks is independence of widget* and
icon themes.  As of now, AFAIK, to fully take advantage of an icon theme
in GTK, you have to add its iconrc file to the gtkrc of the GTK theme in
use.  That's kind of a pain, for example, if you use a system theme
whose gtkrc you can't edit or if you want to change your GTK theme
without changing your icon theme or vice versa.  Basically, all changes
to the GTK theme have to happen in ~, so there's no hope of tracking a
theme's changes system-wide.

I couldn't find anything on this topic on various lists, but I'd be
surprised if it'd never been mentioned before.  What are the chances of
this happening in the future?

Thanks,
Andrew

*- By widget theme, I only mean GTK, as that is all with which I have
theming experience.  If KDE themes are already completely independent,
more power to the devs.