I would like to point out that any software that is advertised as an icon editor should probably be able to load an existing icon file and be able to save it including all icon metadata.

If that is not possible, then the application is really just another paint application.

Why am I mentioning this? As far as I am aware, there are no standard API calls that enable third-party applications to deal with icon metadata.

If I am correct, this is really the biggest hurdle.

Before a full icon editor is released, perhaps a good first step would be to release a shell command that allows to overwrite the picture data in any given icon.

Example: iconswitch "sys:test.info" "myicon.png"

The command would retain all icon metadata but replace the graphics data in an icon file with the content of another file.