CrunchBang Linux

Over 5 years I've gone from Win7 to OSX to Ubuntu/Unity and i've finally settled on what appears to be the ultimate distro. The only thing that frustrates me is that I can't combine a launcher with its task window i.e. I cant pin a launcher to a panel, click to launch it and have some indication that it is running. In Win7 the background changes, in OSX you have a shadow and unity uses little markers, even Gnome shell is doing something similar. In addition I would like to be able to group taskbar icons from the same application together so that I don't end up with 5 identical Icedove icons when composing 5 emails that I have yet to send.

This configuration makes a lot sense to my brain and I'd love to know if such a thing is possible with tint2 or any other panel that you know of that can be installed on #! and plays nicely with openbox. If the above is not possible, then I must be missing something as it would have been developed if enough people wanted it, how is the above config not optimal?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.