The Classic skin (formerly known as Default) used to have pageicons, before they were removed/replaced with simpler text representations. The new Default skin can't use that pageicon value, as it needs to have the url to that icon. Thus we can't have pageicons an all pages without using Default specific templates, just to keep backwards compatibility.

Add to this that the pageicon parameter actually isn't used anywhere else but on _some_ Default pages. Let's remove all those references und start over again with a pageicon parameter pointing to a graphical icon. Shouldn't hurt any of the old skins.