I'm thinking that with just a little tweaking wbar.sh could be made to pull the configuration settings (that it passes to wbar on the command line) from the first few lines of the specified config file. The default config file already has some comment (#) lines at the top, so why not embed the settings (-bpress, positioning, etc) there and parse them out in the script?
I played with putting the command line switches in a separate file because I use a heavily customized wbar command line (sometimes running several wbars with different size and position parameters) but that was cumbersome and every time a software install called the normal wbar.sh it would start up in the default configuration.
Anyone interested in such a project? I'll eventually do it, if only for myself, but maybe sooner if anyone else is interested.