I am in the "I don't care what the default theme is" camp. I am not going to use the default theme unmodified for any site that I make public. There are several levels of what I mean by unmodified depending on what theme choices I have to work with. For quicky sites with low usage I am likely to pick up a distributed theme and change the easy things like the mission and the logo. It would be nice if there were more choices at this level of modification, e.g. pick fixed or fluid, pick a color scheme from several choices, etc. One might call this picking a skin. At a slightly higher level I would like several choices of basic layouts, 1 col, 2 col, 3 col, 5 pane (top, 3 col, foot), etc. The heavy usage sites will always be willing to pay for a custom design so there is little need to cater to them. What can be done with just CSS changes amazes me: http://www.csszengarden.com/ totally different look with no changes to html. Drupal should strive for a set of "looks" as different as these. In fact Dupal has exactly the properties of the above Zen Garden with a small extra twist of the theme being able to change the html by changing templates. For example, I have tweaked Bluemarine by changing colors in CSS and moving the search box and primary menu in the template. I suspect I could have done the later with CSS changes if Bluemarine were more similar to Zen Garden. The contrib themes are a good start but they need a uniform classification scheme so one can tell at a glance the basic properties (fixed/fluid), (css/tables/mixed), n-col, etc. Perhaps the secret, at least for me, is themes which can be easily specialized a bit to look unique by someone with a poor graphic eye for beauty. This means getting all the little things right, like margins, alignment and especially browser agnostic.