I'm sorely disappointed and am afraid you've got it all backwards.
Let's review the sequence:
- Stack Exchange pursues aggressive Area51 policy with frequent formation of new "beta" communities (no direct link at the moment, this question outlines the process).
- Site design queue grows.
- Design bugs go unnoticed and unacknowledged.
- Stack Exchange announces change of criteria for graduation and promises partial perks for sites too long in beta (including custom design elements).
- Now, Stack Exchange drops the idea of custom design elements but claims it is a huge step forward.
Translated from PR-speak, this reads as follows:
"Our design team is too creative to pay back technical debt and too small to keep our past promises. Thus, we no longer promise you any custom designs."
Please, be sincere with the community. You are choosing the path of least resistance, and it doesn't bode well.
What can be done realistically? I can see various alternatives, yet they haven't been pursued so far (some have been rejected for a bunch of reasons).
- Scale back on new site formation?
- Force the design team to open bug database to read-only access from the community?
- Open-source/crowdsource site design? (see Paulster2's suggestion above)
- Set up a rigid, community-accessible schedule for site design?
- Hire more designers?
- Switch some of the more graphically gifted developers from adding new features (StackEgg, anyone?) to fixing the design and technical debt backlog problem?
- ... to be continued ...
