Sam,
I highly recommend linkstyle by @twMat
Its demo page is here: http://linkstyle.tiddlyspot.com/
While its uses there may seem mostly decorative, I use it a great deal for dynamic and complex info that I want to display next to links. Then, given that you can activate the setting to have TW display all titles as links, I find I hardly use tw’s built-in icons anymore at all, since linkstyle is more powerful.
For example, on my google-fonts for tiddlywiki site, what’s actually going on virtually everywhere is just links and lists of links. All the text styling and before-and-after info (including dynamic counts like you see after “quick picks”, and anything else you can specify with a filter operation) is accomplished with linkstyle:
Here’s a good tiddler to poke around with, and follow some links, to see a variety of ways the custom fields (linkstyle and linkstyle-before and linkstyle-after) can work to display info, icons, etc:
https://google-fonts.tiddlyhost.com/#TableOfContents
-Springer