Whose idea WERE those little blue lights on the 3D Dock anyhow? Did the black triangles just not do the trick anymore?

The shell script to get the 2D one on the bottom, if you were wondering, is as follows:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -bool 'TRUE'
killall Dock
To get rid of it, either delete the “no-glass” key from the Dock’s plist file, or just change it’s value to something else.