Well I gave it a test-run and I don't think it's going to work without a whole lot of tweaking. Unfortunately the 50 or so buttons is on one of three similar layouts. I was able to tweak things enough to make the panel look perfect on one of the them but when I tried it on the others, there was a whole lot more to be done and since these layouts also change dynamically through code depending on the device resolution, this would be way more work than I want to take on right now.
Any other ideas? I assume it isn't possible to change the alpha on a StatelistDrawable button? Between this and some other streamlining ideas I had, I was hoping to shave several hundred KB off of the APK, but the other ideas I was kicking around turned out to be more work than expected as well.