though if you are getting poor reception all day, it may be making the radio work harder to find a signal, which reduces the battery. i never used my nexus s 4g for anything other than testing blandroid builds for it, but on my gsm nexus s, the battery would last nearly 2 days with light usage.
I like your project, though! The feature I miss the most from CM the notification pane power widget, though in general it's more fun to be able to tweak all kinds of things. I've been thinking about getting into some android dev work (especially aiding the efforts to port CM to whatever device I'm using at the time!), but I have no experience in reverse engineering/low-level mobile work.
yeah, that seems to be the most commonly asked-for feature from users of my rom. from what i've seen in other projects, integrating it can lead to bugs, so i've avoided merging it. also, from what i've seen in screenshots, android 4 seems to have some of that functionality integrated into the pull-down notification window.