PROBLEM! - Artificer Site Sidebar Navigation

When I am logged into my installation of UNA CMS there is a menu on the left. It's call "Site Sidebar." For the past couple hours I've been going around and around trying to change the icon and the color of the icons in this side bar. Stubbornly, no matter what I try, I cannot get those icons to budge. I can change the icons easily everywhere else but to get my site to match I need to change those sidebar icons. The menu module is explicitly controlled by the Artificer theme package rather than the core System. Because you overrode the standard navigation engine, it completely ignores standard system classes like col-red1 and blocks global style overrides. Why did you hardcode asset pathing and lock users out of basic menu customization?

EXTREMELY FRUSTRATED - I've wasted a lot of time on what should be a simple "flip of the switch" ugly icon change.