Thanks to forum poster msdark, I've run into a little project called wbar. It's a nice looking quicklaunch bar that could potentially find its way onto my desktop or laptop. I'll try it out in the near future as there seems to be a PKGBUILD in aur for both the program itself and a gui configuration tool written in python for some of its options. Definitely marking this one down as "to-do."

As far as those quickstart guides go, I'm probably going to take a little bit longer than expected. Possibly sometime this weekend they'll get some of the attention they deserve.