I made a sort of brainstorming topic for the equipment icons, in the OXCE subforum. I see you've already found it.
As long as there's no clearly desirable proposal for what to do with those icons or the space they occupy, I don't think it's worth it to try to do anything with my half-assed ideas.
Meridian seemed okay with the scaling bars (and some defense rescaling, too). Since these are pretty easy to do, perhaps there will be an OXCE release including them in the not too distant future. So I suppose we shouldn't get ahead of this in BAI, unless it gets forgotten for too long.