I agree. You probably know, the icons are such a powerful tool and beyond what I believe 95% of people realize. We use them far beyond menus. I've only found DNN 9 to be quite a set back. To have this removed is terrible. We use it to individually allow admins to set page backgrounds, banners, etc on each page, you can get so creative with the use of it. My EVOQ clients won't even upgrade to DNN 9 because they hate the new persona bar let alone all the other things that seem to come with it. The command line type feature sure they adopted will be handy to use but not to hand off to clients for daily use.

Don't get it.

If DNN aren't up for adding it back, is it possible to create a custom UI to fill the gap, or is it deprecated (i.e. the database value will be going away completely in a future release)?

We're new to the platform, but we've been asked to implement a variety of navigation menus with icons. Ideally we'd use the built-in navigation features, but without access to icons it'd be a bit tricky.