Hi This discussion moved from from the dev list.
This is my suggestion for getting a new theme into 4.8. It makes the assumption (one that not everyone agrees with) that the best thing for 4.8 is to get a new "sexy/classy/corporate" theme - one that themers will generally avoid, but which non-technical users will appreciate in vanilla Drupal installation.
1. Someone with a good knowledge of contrib themes (ie. not me) creates a list of a dozen good looking (and reasonably coded) themes. 2. A public poll is created in the drupal.org forums, and the best design chosen. 3. The chosen theme goes into core, and then we hastily patch it to make it core-worthy. (or the other way round)
Regards Simon