I run dwm with the status bar hidden by default. I don't want to be distracted with system info through xsetroot nor need to see the window title. Often, I'll forget about open applications in other tags so sometimes toggle the status bar to find an active tag (NB, is there an equivalent to xmonad's [runOrRaise][1] action in dwm?). Mostly though, I hide status bar for maximum screen real estate.
It would seem there might be opportunity here to reduce the dwm codebase by handing off responsibility of the status bar to something else, similar to how xmonad does it. dwm could provide an interface that outputs "desktop" and urgency hints rather than implementing the status bar itself. I've searched gmane for previous discussion on this and there may be an argument that conforming to a ewmh style interface will be overcomplicating things. Any thoughts on this? [1]: http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Actions-WindowGo.html#v:runOrRaise