Ended up using the style of bed shown below. I think it's a good compromise, personally. The new update is done,
including the smoothed double-sized versions. The tileset should now be completely in line with the vanilla set courtesy of 0rion's suggestions. This includes the new bed, cabinet, and also a new ² tile. The latter tries to strike a balance being a "2" and representing the various dead vermin/body parts that invariably clutter up the fortress. In the spirit of bringing things in line more with vanilla, I enabled the intro by default
and set the colours to be the default. The alternate colours are still included. I also sprinkled the alternates folder liberally with comparative screenshots so that everything is much easier to use.
I decided against including the solid background. Vherid kindly sent it to me and the credit to the solid background version is both his and CLA. It causes graphical glitches in the text though, which seems to be against the spirit of the set. (It would also bring my tileset count to 32, up from the current 16, but that was less of a concern.) If anybody wants it I can post it. Thanks, Vherid!
The gem tile has also been redrawn, and the heart was fixed up slightly.
In summary, the download is easier to use, I have properly smoothed double-sized versions, and the whole set has been brought in line with the vanilla set. At this point there aren't any tiles left that I have my eye on, for the moment. I'm still not a huge fan of the dwarf soldiers, but every time I redraw them I'm unsatisfied with the result (or they look too similar to the other race's soldiers), so I'm leaving them be.
I considered adding the "depth effect" that so many nice sets seem to have, but decided I didn't like it after all. True depth would be nice, but changing the tile just shows the same amount of information as before, and I rather like the blue sky when I'm playing. It's still easy to change, though. Change the SKY line in d_init.txt. Crazy 8x8s uses "[SKY:250:8:0:0]".
New beds: