I love the smell, taste and quality of Americolor. Really tastes good, and in the past, I hated royal icing so much that I would base coat my cookies with glaze icing, then royal icing over that. OK, so sometimes I still do that, because that still tastes better than even the best royal icing.
One trick for taste... I don't use clear vanilla, as most of it is imitation vanilla. I use good quality bourbon vanilla and then to combat the dark color, I add a good squirt of white food coloring when mixing the batch. It comes out nice and white, and I think it helps to take other colorants as well, since you're starting from a more opaque base.
BTW, has anyone experimented with keeping a vanilla bean or two in your container of powdered sugar?