dark background, unreadable modeline

Am I the only one? My background is black, and the default selected colors for fontification is fine. However, the modeline colors are unreadable. This is what I see: I see in modeline.el that the colors are hard-coded, and not dependent on the frame's background type. I converted these to defcustom, but I ended up without colors, I guess because the modeline faces are created before the initial frame, so the `(class color)' part fails. I'm not sure how to go about fixing this, but I know that jwz (and others) will bitch about this. And they will be right. Maybe if we changed the colors to something that would look good on a black brackground and the default background. But I can't find any good colors for that. -- Colin