Expand All/Collapse All buttons for bar of Category Panel?

[Panther]

After wondering for a while why there didn't seem to be an easy way to expand and collapse categories in my category windows (because there was no button on the top/menu bar for those windows), I did finally remember to look through the help file and learned that you can do this with Numpad* and Ctrl+Numpad*.

I'm glad to know now that there is a way to do this, but I still have two issues with that methodology that I was thinking might be able to be solved with a simple new feature/tweak:

1.  I have to remember shortcut key combinations, which is difficult to do especially with a program that I don't use frequently or regularly - it would be much easier (IMHO) to have a button there on the top bar where I'm naturally going to look for it, and I don't need to try to remember the special key combos;

2.  Even though the key combos seem to work, they seem to be tied specifically to whatever category you actually have selected at the time.  Thus, to "expand all" you have to remember to go select the top/all category (which may require scrolling up a ways if you're well down on the list when you want to do this), and then remember what the key combo is - it would be much easier (IMHO) to just have the expand all/collapse all buttons on the bar along the top so you could do that whenever you wanted to, no matter where on the list you happened to be at the time. 

There seems to be plenty of room for a couple more buttons on that bar (and there are a bunch of buttons up there now which only do things that you can already also easily do using the right-click menu). 

Not a huge deal, of course, but something I'd like to see if it's not too difficult to do. 

Alternately, is this already possible through some way of adding your own commands/buttons to that bar?  While I was playing around with the settings for the category panel, I found something that looked like it would let you add up to 6 more things up there, but I couldn't figure out exactly what that was about (it looked like adding tabs to the "Recent" and "Current" bar, and not buttons for commands, so it didn't look promising for this).