calling iwconfig and ifconfig every three seconds not efficient

This will not be dealt with in the 1.x series, it will be included in the rewrite, to be released in the yet unknown late future.

All bugs in wicd 1.x will not be fixed unless they are considered sufficiently problematic by the development team.

(It does seem like using an rtnetlink socket and RTMGRP_LINK would be a much more efficient way to monitor link state changes, which I assume is what wicd is doing here.)

Exactly.

I've been investigating how to use netlink sockets from Python, but it's quite a nightmare. I hope I won't finally give up :)

What I'd like to do is reimplement the behaviour of "ip monitor link" using Python. I already looked at the source code of "ip monitor" and "iotop" (the first one for the proper implementation, the second one because it uses netlink within Py).
However, the code is quite complex, and I haven't yet been able to make a simple status monitor listening to a netlink socket.

Be assured that this is what WICD is heading to though ;)

David