If I were running at such a low resolution, I'd sure try to avoid any additional stuff in the height, and such a box is at least one row high. If this is ever going to happen, I'd rather change the background colour of the channel label and not use it as a seperate field.
If you color to the name box, the black text will be hard to read and most of all you will loose the possibility to have left click and right click actions related to groups.
But let me clarify this a little bit :
I don't use the VU-Meters (I don't know who does),
I don't expand it, it doesn't take on my workspace, everything's fine.
I do use the plugin box under the channel name sometimes (for DirectX effects), but once I've set the plugins, I collapse the box and I'm done with it.
Well obviously the color box would work exactly in the same way. Let's say I start a new song, I'm not going to add colors everywhere right from the start, so I don't expand the color box.
Now a few minutes (hours) later, I need to organize : I
expand the color box, add the same color for channels I want to group, and maybe I open the channel manager and group channels with the same color (Ctrl left click + drag and drop as said before). Then I can leave the color box
closed to work with the track if I need space, no problem.
But now I want to focus on the piano :
expand the color box, right click on the color of any piano channels and select
solo group. Great, I can hear the piano part, but wait I want to record it : shift + left click on the color box to directly
record select all piano channels.
Now I'm done with that, I
collapse the damn 12 pixels box (man that takes my space, I can't breathe) and go on with my song.

But wait ! Now I want to go on a live performance with this great pattern with 48 channels : I
expand the color box to see my different groups (strings, piano, brass, ...), I select the low display to see more channels : I can't read the channel names but it's easy to keep track of the different groups with these colors.
I hit play... Ok, next pattern I'm loosing all the drums (4 channels) and adding the 8 channels of synth chords along with my cool piano riffs (6 channels) : Shift + left click on a blue box (drums), a yellow box (synth) and a red box (piano). 3 clicks instead of 18...
Vertical space is not a problem : expand... collapse.
