Thank you Micas for that exellent article. As i stated, not so cut and dry as some might think.
I believe you will even see hadith enforced differently in different areas of Indonesia. Certainly it doesn't apply in Bali, but other areas are more strict and i believe it would be much harder to find an unabstracted human form on, say, a keris from Sulawesi.
Those are interesting examples that you show Wayne. The second one i think is a fairly recent example of a wayang figure and i have frequently seen whole collections of these characters in hilt form on ebay. I am not sure if they are being carved in Jawa or Madura (or perhaps elsewhere), but they are clearly being made for Javanese or Madurese keris, not Balinese ones. They are still carving these today AFAIK.
The horse and the winged horse (not to beat a dead horse, mind you
) is a common motif in Madura and i have one that is probably mid 20th C, so it seems obvious that these laws are not enforced in these areas in the modern age.