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Oh I see what you mean about the other variants. Yes I expect they would be a mess. There have been markup changes as well as CSS changes, and they wouldn't know how to deal with it. TBH I can think of so much to do that I just totally ignored the other variants and went for it.

It's probably best to disable variant selection until we're almost out of alpha, quite frankly, unless someone is into updating them all the time.

No, definitely not. We need variants, at least the simple version and the fancy version. (you say you also want a dark version apart from them).
The default theme cannot be harder to customize that smf 2.0. And the git version is again with fancy effects in index.css. The theme must be easy to work with. Fancy is all nice and dandy for customizations*, which won't happen if we keep making the default index.css far out of reach.

I understand that the latest plan is to have an index.css with common/layout/simple/whatever stuffs, _green (I assume) for the Elkish look and feel (this look and feel), and _white for the rest of a variant simple to customize. With some boundary separation between index.css and _white. OK:

Commit color or fancy green changes in _green (and where suitable in _white), and you're done. *Not in index.css, if they're not part of the base.

Yes, it wont be harder to customise. We had this discussion yesterday though. This code was written several days ago.

Variants are fine. I'm all for them. But, while I'm pulling so much apart and rebuilding it so it will be easier to customise, and so it'll look good by default, it's a lot more hassle to split it up. That's why I just did it the way I did. My plan was to get the light variant sorted, then split it into index.css (pure framework only) and variant.css (everything else). Then copy the variant css and turn that copy into a dark variant stylesheet (which will be really easy, once everything else is sorted). Then use a second copy of the light variant styelsheet to make the stripped down "Elk boilerplate" variant. That is by far the easiest way to get from A to B, IMO.

If you want me to turn index.css into pure framework, I'll do that, but that means I have to take over one of the variant files for the default. It will also slow down progress, IMO.

ETA: The point is, I haven't even got things ordered correctly in index.css (they're still all over the place, like in 2.0.x code that we inherited), and there's no finalisation on what will be in it to get ordered anyway. This is an alpha.

Ok, look at it this way: I don't think it makes sense to slow down default theme progress in an alpha for the sake of what are, effectively, custom themes. Custom themes are rarely made before beta at the earliest. Usually, nobody expects to do custom theming for an alpha, or if they are crazy enough to do it they know full well that they will be chasing a moving target and it will be a real PITA.

Uninterestingly, I found that the new site works much better in mobile mode, but I just saw the desktop version, and went 'meh'.

Doing a default theme sure is hard... I've got two extra variants for Wedge that I haven't committed for fear of public backlash, ah ah... But one of them, is the most stripped down version I could ever do, and I'm adamant I'll get it to be the root skin, one day.
Note: by 'root skin', I don't mean 'default skin'. Wedge is built in a way that the default skin can very well be a sub-skin, of course. My plan is to keep the current skin as the default one, as most people are well used to it, and I like it, too.

Anyway, just saying: don't fear removing stuff. It's the current trend, anyway... Also, Bloc is a master at this.

Oh? The site suddenly changed to me, either a new FTP update, or my cache was outdated, but anyway, it looks much better now, so way to go...

  That's the latest default theme straight from my local. Glad you like it. The old one was sort of still the SMF 2.1 alpha theme, which I was never completely happy with.