Q:

Add fancy design to pgfplots (shadows, rounded corners, reflections)

In our company we would like to run the client reportings in LaTeX, which works quite well, but we are struggeling with the design requirements for plots - we use pgfplots. Our aim is to get those fancy "kind of reflecting" plots, which also could use some shadow, so it looks a bit three-dimensional. 
The only shadow we can get is this drop shadow, but it should look like the glowing shadow in the TikZ/PGF reference (v2.1 p.418), which seems only available for circles (at least for me). For the reflection I tried fadings, but this leeds to problems with the shadow. Also the fading does not work equal for all bars, but depends on their heights. 
Last points are the round corners, which work, but for the top corners and the bottom corners (intererstingly not for the shadow). This also looks strange and it would be prefered to only get round top corners. 
Below I attached a small sample with our current status and I would be glad for suggestions.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\usetikzlibrary{shadows}

\begin{document}

\tikzfading[name=fade down,
    top color=transparent!30,
    bottom color=transparent!0]

\begin{tikzpicture}
    \begin{axis}[axis x line*=bottom,
            axis y line*=left, drop shadow] 
    \addplot[ybar, blue, fill,path fading=fade down, rounded corners=2pt]
    coordinates{(1,2.9) (2,1.7) (3,4.2) (4,5.1) (5,4) (6,2.2)};
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}

A:

There are many hacks that can be applied but I think this is innocent enough to be considered as a solution. 
For the shadows, one can use the pgf-blur package(or library for TikZ with a .dtx file) developed by Martin Giese. See Reuse of soft path in fading declaration? Transformation of fadings? So combining the nice shadows with the plot shift such that the rounded rectangles disappear, it looks like "3D". The reason why the shadows don't have the problem is precisely why this hack works they are clipped by the axis. 
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\usetikzlibrary{shadows.blur}

\begin{document}

\tikzfading[name=fade down,
    top color=transparent!30,
    bottom color=transparent!0]

\begin{tikzpicture}
    \begin{axis}[axis x line*=bottom,
            axis y line*=left, blur shadow] 
    \addplot[yshift=-2pt,ybar, blue, fill,path fading=fade down, rounded corners=2pt]
    coordinates{(1,2.9) (2,1.7) (3,4.2) (4,5.1) (5,4) (6,2.2)};
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}

