Hi Taco,
I'll take your thoughts in consideration, but not for the software-center : it's not just been dropped, it's been replaced with a gnome software center, which is not too bad once you get used to this different presentation.
About the default files:
you get .config/openbox and also .config/pcmanfm and also .config/libfm, which is the directory of the pcmanfm library.
Ok, now this said, you can always revert as you well know... getting them back from /etc/skel.
In .config/openbox the symlinks just point to the sub-directory .config/openbox/lang which is where are the files for the openbox menus shortcuts language. You might give it a try, once the files are again there, right click on the desktop and see : it's default is English. Other options are French and German (this latter, not quite up to date, I fear).
You ALSO have *readme files* in the directory, where you have all explanations about how to set it up to your liking! And in the autostart file under .config/openbox, you have plenty comments, default in English, to help you make it as you like!
1 ) you don't need feh, hsetroot does the same job, and is default installed for it's needed by openbox to get a dark splash instead of grey.
2 ) you can use idesk - program to show icons on the desktop
how to configure it? Once idesk is started, go into it's ~/.idesk directory, look at the examples and from there add the icons you want (manually) on the desktop. This is how I had done a pclinuxos kde with xsnow running in it, back in time.
(still keeping a copy, as it was a unique one with a very special setup/and look and feel :
http://downloads.linuxvillage.org/miscellaneous/ISOS/PCLinuxOS_En/)
(xsnow needs a root background to work… Then even now in all Bento you can have 2 different setups, just look into the default menu.xml file, you'll find some tricks there with the tags containing "xsnow", and also the related bash script to start/stop xsnow in /usr/local/bin … it just needs to install xsnow from the respos).