Hi @gerry,
I will post the link here for completeness. After we had that discussion at the time being it was decided that the multistate switch should become a core node: the ui-button-group node was born.
Last weekend I migrated my own dashboard finally to D2. And now I use that button group node as a replacement for all my old ui-multistate-switch nodes.
Instead of changing hotnipi's sample code, I would appreciate if you could try to do your changes on the ui-button-group node instead. You can find the frontend code here. That is the only way to improve our core ui nodes. And I assume Joe doesn't mind to get some help from the community...
About your multiline question: since CSS isn't my best friend, I am afraid I need to pass that question on to others reading this.
Good luck!
Bart