Just to throw in my two cents, I've seen a lot of good suggestions, and some not so good ones here. Clearly not everyone can be happy with one solution, so it seems to me the obvious answer is to give us choices. Personally I use a skin called albedo, it's similar to purity but with a little more black, and it's the closest I've found to what I consider perfect. Not that it couldn't use improvement.
What confuses me (and I've been reading these discussions about eye candy for a long time) is why isn't it possible for dedicated users to make their own skins the way they want? There is already a page where people can upload and download skins. It would answer a lot of questions about what does and doesn't work to just give as many choices as possible and see what is popular and what isn't and let decisions about future changes to the standard choices be informed by that data.
All our needs are different, some of us use MC for video, others audio, some both. Some of us have huge libraries and some don't, some people use 60" TVs and others a 20" monitor and it all looks different and behaves differently depending on where you stand. For example the animated lists and 3D cover art look slick in still picture, but for browsing through thousands of albums or movies they are clumsy and slow, but I bet they work great in a library of a couple hundred or less.
If the answer to why making custom skins isn't popular is that the tools aren't there, and the reason that the tools aren't there is that to implement them would take a huge amount of time and resources that could be better spent improving other areas then I agree with Jim, that MC already looks pretty darn good and you can't spend endless hours trying to please everyone, spend your limited resources making more substantial changes.
On the other hand we're on version 17 of MC already and it's pretty incredibly sophisticated and capable. A lot of people have been clamoring for a long time that the function is outpacing the form and at some point you'll have to address that. At what point will you be satisfied enough with the function to stop and take the time to give us the tools that so many have been asking for, and let them go to work?
It seems to me there are some talented and motivated people out there who would be happy to freely give their time creating new looks for your program if they had the tools available. I'm a carpenter by trade and I fully understand that trying to do quality work without the right tools is a frustrating exercise in futility. I can only think that so long as changes aren't whimsically forced on us but rather offered up as options (skins) that can only be a good thing. And hey, we might all learn something.
