Comment 33 for bug 141227

Craig Duquette: There's no talk here about hampering GNOME developers to improve their icon themes for future versions. We only need a correct workaround for the next 6 months, since it was working in Feisty and (hopefully) will be in Hardy, it is no acceptable we destroy all our optional themes in Gutsy. The fix is harmless, easy to implement and doesn't raise any problem for future versions since it will be automatically replaced.

Going the other way is not possible: asking all users to modify manually their ~/.gtkrc will cause future improvements not to be applied since the customized file will still be there. Patching Ubuntu packages is the right way to correct bugs, even temporarily.