I'm not sure which principles you disagree with, but I do enjoy a bit of padding and slightly larger fonts. My eyes are old and experience enough strain as it is.

I could do with bucking the low-contrast trend though, that gets my goat

Yea, I also try pushing fonts as large as possible without sacrificing too much space. I have the following modified fonts for better reading: (choose your own font oc)

  #  Name of the menu font.
  MenuFontNameXft="Luxi Sans:size=13"
  #  Menu icon size.
  MenuIconSize=23 # [8-128]
  #  Name of the normal button font.
  NormalButtonFontNameXft="Luxi Sans:size=12"
  #  Name of the normal task bar item font.
  NormalTaskBarFontNameXft="Luxi Sans:size=12"
  #  Name of the font for Alt+Tab switcher window.
  QuickSwitchFontNameXft="DejaVu Sans Mono:monospace:size=11:bold"

Yes, most icewm styling is probably for a time of 1024x768 display or even smaller.