Comment 142 for bug 527458

Dmitrijs, your screen shot is clearly a good example of badly tuned tooltips.

On my system they do not cover the other indicator icons because I have them on the top panel and they are correctly set to pop-up below the panel. This way they do not block your ability to see any of the other indicators.

Your case of having the indicators on the bottom panel should work just as well by default. Somehow that was overlooked by testers and left your bottom panel tooltips broken. Clearly that is a bug that should have been cleaned up prior to release. If the tooltips were tuned properly and popped up just above your bottom panel, nothing else in the panel would be covered by them and you'd find your entire list of issues to be resolved.

So what you found is clearly a bug, but I have a hard time seeing why it's better to throw out the feature rather than just fix the bug.