> a non standard waste of resources

I don't know what resources you are talking about, but it's definitely not wasting my screen resources as others do.

My vertical spaced is saved my menu-on-panel integration, on fullscreen title goes into panel too. Left-panel is also nice, it doesn't do "minimize on second click" as docky or others, it does nice "overview" on click on multi-window app. And finally, it also saves space by combining launcher and app-switcher.