wp Zen Garden!

The more you can have a *selection* of standard “skins” which newbies and busies can use, the more you ease newbies and busies into the software.
The more people you ease into the software, the greater the user base.
The greater the user base, the greater the number of developers.
The greater the number of developers, the more features and fun stuff.
Evabody win, hah!

In the long term, yes. In the short term, newbies and busies aren’t going to start using WordPress in any great numbers until the documentation’s sorted, and I don’t think they’re looking for new developers anyway.

OK, well… I think people are moving off of the point of my idea, maybe I didnt make it clear enough. My idea primarily creates a place where website designers who use WP can come together and showcase their latest pieces of work. It basically gives designers who use WP a reason to create new things and use new techniques which they have decised and or came across.
It ALSO builds up a collection of open source ‘skins’ for WordPress which many WP users will be willing to snap up and use. It ALSO shows how flexible WordPress is in terms of design.

Phhhhhaugh! I actually skipped the last few posts of this because everyone seemed to be splitting along lines that have become all-to-familiar.
Can I suggest something very simple? CHANGE the default WP template. It’s NOT sufficiently skinnable to attract any interest from the sort of people you want to design layouts for you. END OF STORY.
What I’m getting at is that if you want to bother soliciting designs, you want some really talented designers to play with you. For that, you need a template that has a few more <div> tags, and not quite so many double-wrapped divs, so that you can actually change the design in CSS, instead of just fiddling with the colors =T
I (and many others, I’m sure) would be happy to donate a more CSS-magic-friendly template which would of course still pass all the usual compliancy tests.
 
Now, to further elaborate on the general concept: What’s called for is a “wp-style” directory off the root, so that the entire design could be hacked by simply dropping in a new style directory, without changing any of the (new) original template. Thus, the current .css would move in there, and the designer would be free to put any images they wanted to use into that folder (or sub-folders of it).
If you want to do this now, your ‘designs’ would have to be able to replace the default index.php (at least) and probably the wp-comments*.php and archives.php too. =(