No harm done

I am playing Civilization, and I know from there that including other people's mod in your own is a standard there, but considered theft in Oblivion - but then Oblivion has tools for making mods work fine together, which Civ lacks...
BTW, how did you learn about huds and menuQue, any good guides you can recommend??
MenuQue has a pretty good readme hidden down in the archive's data folder. For general xml, the only guide I know about is the http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Category:Oblivion_XML
-Reverse engineering your mod would prove immensely difficult and time consuming.
That is how I have learnt most of it though, by reverse engineering vanilla's and the various UI mods' xml files - and I've learned a lot by practice. HUD Status Bars isn't the first mod of mine where I fudge the xml, I do it in lot of my mods (most obvious in Display Stats and Enhanced Hotkeys, but also in Map Marker Overhaul, Enhanced Economy and Useful Houses).