I think these are good steps towards the right direction. One thing I noticed regarding the flag-icons in the chat, but which may or may not be related to this feature itself;



When using h.mut to teamchat flagholder's health automatically, there is a roughly a 50% chance that the flag icon is not displayed in the chat when a player captures the flag, but I haven't identified any clear pattern to this. It could be also an issue in h.mut itself, so I'm not sure if it's directly or indirectly related, so just an observation.

Back to the main topic; I also seem to prefer the absence of additional spectator metadata and in that sense the player list looks much cleaner to me than before. I personally don't have much of a preference whether the flag-icon should appear on the left or right side of the player name in general, but I sense that the strong preference in the online community (without any concrete statistical data) is that the flag-icons appear on the right side, like previously. The flag-icon itself should be alright, from what I understood.

What if the cog-icon was white? Or would that make it look like a "daisy"?