It takes a professional designer (or rather, a dozen of them) to produce a professional-looking desktop theme. Which is exactly what the majority of FOSS projec

It takes a professional designer (or rather, a dozen of them) to produce a professional-looking desktop theme. Which is exactly what the majority of FOSS projects lack. When you let a programmer dictate the design, you end up with a lot of features and a lot of misaligned margins. In my experience, many programmers just don't care about pixel-perfect designs. Yes, I'm talking about the same group of people who scoff at typography because "the content is the only thing that matters", blah blah blah. Admittedly, I have no data to back this up, but I have a gut feeling that lightweight desktop environments are particularly teeming with this "function before form" crowd. When you treat design as a second-class citizen of your project, it's no wonder you can't attract good designers to work with you. On the other hand, when you let a designer dictate the design, you end up with perfectly aligned margins and anti-aliased corners, but all the features and configuration options you care about are hidden behind five clicks and a keyboard shortcut, or worse, removed entirely because they somehow violate the designer's philosophy :(