In reply to Jeff Chandler.

Standards are good, so long as they don't restrict what you are able to do. There's an API for adding an options page to WordPress now, but it's not restrictive as you can bypass it if you really need to (which you do need to for some edge cases), so people don't mind that type of thing. It's when the standard stops you from doing things that you want to, or at least actively discourages you from doing something outside of the box, which begins to annoy people.

All this talk of standardising things is motivating me to try to figure out a patch for core which would setup a (reusable) API to implement header images (rather than the current system which seems to be hard coded in). Then we could use that same API to implement other theme wide images, things like banner images, footer images, sidebar images etc. rather than having to custom code them all.