*Design* is hard. A completely custom look and feel for your website is hard. Cross browser CSS is hard. Designing individual pages in HTML
and uploading them via FTP is hard. None of these things have anything to do with Drupal.
I concur. I wrote a mini-essay a while back on the nature of this problem. In a fit of narcissism, I will copy-and-paste a relevant portion. In the world of Movable Type and WordPress, it's a foregone conclusion that connecting your blog to your de.licio.us favorites or adding a 'quote of the day' in the sidebar will involve wading deep into templating languages and perhaps Perl or PHP. One of the snappier WordPress themes, K2, boasts features like "compatability with multiple authors" and "Showing the latest comments." A lot of work has gone into making K2 flexible enough to deal with more than one or two configuration scenerios, and the work shows. What really struck me was that any Drupal theme released without that sort of flexibility would be sent back to the drawing board as broken. New modules are released almost daily, shoving new content types and new presentation paradigms and new tools and options into the Drupal framework. The Drupal themes one can download from the main site take them in stride thanks to the tremendously flexible templating system. I've thrown together quickie themes for Drupal that make all sorts of assumptions (we'll never had sidebars, we don't need to display comments, only Module X and Module Y will ever be installed...) and it's as easy as any other system. Easier, in some cases. In about twenty minutes , I whipped up a very rough 'compatability theme' that lets a Drupal site use CSS skins originally designed for Movable Type blogs. But making a theme that's visually stunning, cleanly designed, AND flexible enough to handle anything J. Random User installs into their Drupal build can be a pretty daunting task. That's a DESIGN problem, not a DRUPAL problem. It's certainly something we can try to take a stab at improving. It's certainly an opportunity for some highly-skilled designers to step in and create some great (and highly flexible) themes... But the only way to make theming 'brain dead simple' is to dramtically reduce the number of scenerios themes have to deal with. That means admitting that your 'easy' theme will only work with a small subset of Drupal's features. --Jeff