How to change tiles' background color in Windows 8.1 start screen?

Two days ago I got a response from the Windows Team, referencing my participation in this thread, and telling me how to change things.

They told me how to go to personalize, and pick out my main and accent colors.  Holy Krab Batman, are they serious?  I had that done 15 minutes after I got my new laptop for my birthday.  How can we ask them to solve the problem, when they don't even understand our complaint?

I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say our accent and background colors are just fine thank you.

How about fixing the tiles, or charms, so the program names aren't ona  background of  blood red, pumpkin orange, or Linda Blair Green?

Of course I tried to answer the email they sent me, but here's a shocker....it didn't go through.

Did I really think I could reply to the email they sent me?

It (8.1 tiles) is so ugly that I have stopped upgrading any machines to Windows 8.1.  There were several other things that I found work a rounds for to get rid of Microsoft's changes.  Not for this issue.  Microsoft also made it impossible to roll windows 8.1 back without just doing a complete restore.  Truthfully, I will be advising any of my clients to ignore 8.1.   In fact, it sort of made me lose faith in Microsoft's judgments.  I guess I was the last one to have that anyway.

Manifest files for all the 300+ silent installers I maintain? Tiles are not versatile and now even less so. Additionally, if you want a certain program to get a shortcut on your desktop you have to go into ProgramData folders to create shortcuts. Why can't Microsoft figure out how to create shortcuts from tiles since the tiles refer to the programs also? Really, all this is ridiculous and it has no working chance and will/should be looked back on as one of the Win8.x failures. Further, now applications that install (not talking about faux Store apps) won't create shortcut in the Start screen anymore either, so you have to add them to Start manually, one by one. This may seem like a good idea when you have no idea what you're doing on a PC (yes, Win8 is dumbing down computing a lot) but when you run a tight ship and are a power user you will find everything is now harder for you, but the options for you to change behaviors have been capped too. So like I said, one step forward, two steps back. There's also no way to add something to the charmbar, like a direct shutdown button so only one click would be needed. Now 3 are needed... Etc.

Thanks Paul. You mean I have to create a .VisualElementsManifest.xml file for EACH app listed in start screen? O_O

It seems that MS programmers loose their skills - to change a tile background color I have to perform a Linux-like witchery (\/) <- facepalm

Search out one of my previous posts here for how to solve this problem for individual applications with manifest files.

I note that Microsoft Office has now been updated with manifests, so the tile problem for Office applications is fixed (for Office 365 users, at least).

I am working on an automated solution which I will post in my SkyDrive Public folder in the near future (I am currently doing it with batch files, but it is not user friendly enough for general distribution).