Jon,
Now I figured out why you're so reluctant to just make the swatches smaller as I proposed: because you used the GTK standard icon sizes for swatch sizes.
I don't think this makes a lot of sense, honestly. A swatch is not an icon at all. However, I'll leave this up to you, but in any case I just want to reiterate the need for adding one or two smaller sizes that GTK does not have. You can even make them dependent on the existing sizes, for example by making them 75% and 50% of Gtk::ICON_SIZE_MENU. But we _really_ need them, both for icons and for swatches. The current "small" size of the swatches is NOT small by any stretch of the imagination.
By the way, selecting the Huge size of the swatches in the bottom panel crashes Inkscape.
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org