Hi Joel,
I notice that some of Wine's icons have been changed in recent releases. In principle I think updating the icons is a great idea, but right now I gotta say that icons in Wine are a real disaster.
I agree with you, they look pretty poor.
And the new golden Folder icons look completely out of place - they bear no resemblance to anything else, they've been scaled down poorly, they don't look like Windows icons, and they don't fit in with the Gnome desktop (and I can't imagine they'd look good in KDE or on Mac either).
I opened a bug for the folder icons: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15810
The problem that I see with the new SVG icon support is that we use icotool to create the small-size icons from the SVG when the SVG is available. This rarely works well. I think we need to maintain hand-drawn small-size icons, and optionally use SVG to generate larger-size (larger than 32x32) icons.
Some of the icons, as you say, don't look consistent. You might try bugging Herve, as he's been redrawing all the icons.
As far as whether to use Tango, I have no opinion there. --Juan