Where are the good themes?

I recently moved my personal and technical blogs to wordpress.com, and set them up with stock themes. It struck me while doing it that the available themes suck pretty badly. There is a route to make things a little more aesthetically pleasing, but it involves paying WordPress $15 a year, and then you only get to monkey with CSS.

I guess I’m really wondering when the powers at WordPress are going to pull their finger out and add some nice, clean themes that work correctly for all cases.

Every single theme seems to have one fault or another – usually to do with white-space between sidebar elements, or the size or style of heading tags.

The closest to a nice layout is perhaps the Vengeance theme, but even that has far too little white space between the body text area and the sidebar. Know-it-alls will no doubt want to comment about the sandbox theme, but that takes you down the pay for CSS route.

Of course there is a solution – host your own blog with the script from wordpress.org – which affords you complete creative freedom to do what you want. I can understand why wordpress.com does not allow such freedom though – the support overhead would cripple them.