I've found a few options for those of us that want to cook roms without htc dialer but don't want to lose features -
BluetoothNotifierIcon - shows an icon in the taskbar when bluetooth is enabled
SetVolume - a finger friendly volume control that allows incall volume to work with wm6.5 dialer
And I also attached a decent htc-ish skin for the default wm dialer that I put together for a couple skins at skinzone...
