It wasn't my initial plan to use OblyTile for aid the customisation of the start screen. But after I saw how non cohesive our own applications looked compared to the ones included in the original SOE, we decided to spend the afternoon developing Tiles for our own applications.
In terms of Start8/ClassicShell. Before commencing work on my image build, for interests sake I contacted Stardock for a quote Start8 to see how much it would cost to purchase for inclusion on our SOE. The quote they provided wasn't terribly economical for school's who wished to provide a Start Menu....