The list of my results, with all the templates with some factor saying "improve me":
- Green Mile: table(-based)
- xcur: not working at my installation, div soup
- Bazooka: table
- Blogger-Death v0.1: table
- blue: table
- blue-haze: table
- Blue Iceberg: table
- Brown Paper: preview missing, not downloadable (missing on the mirror?)
- carl_blue: table
- Serendipity 3.0: table, name misleading?
- carl_green: table
- codeschmiede: table
- coffee_bar: table
- Coffee Cup: table
- Blue Streak: table
- CoSTa's Nature Theme v0.5: table (heavy use)
- Serendipity v2.3: table (This is default!?)
- XBox 360: table
- Earphone: table
- Elitist Latte: table
- fifty50: table
- Gila Two: table
- HippoRatorium: table
- Idea: table
- informatif: table
- iphone.app: no preview
- Joshua: table
- Joshua-Nino 1.1: table
- Joshua Tree: table
- Kamouflage v1.1: table
- Mo3: Mentions to need some plugins and indeed dies without them. necessary to throw 500?
- MT - Clean: table
- MT - GeorgiaBlue: table
- MT - GettysBurg: table
- MT - Plainjane: table
- MT - Rusty: table
- MT - Trendy: table
- MT3 - Chalkboard: table
- MT3 - Gettysburg: table
- MT3 - Independence: table
- MT3 - Squash: table
- newfangled: table
- Newspaper Blog: table
- Party Brown: table
- Powered: table
- BlueGrey: table
- Orange: table
- s9y Thin: table
- Safety Yellow: table
- Slate Grey: table
- Styled Bar (colorsets): table
- Blogger-Tabacco: table
- Tool-Box: table
- Truth: table
- wp-clone: table
- XHTML MP 0.1: no preview
- xkur: table
So, i'm not totally sure what to do with that list, and of course it's not my call to make.
But i want to suggest the following: let's improve the template-selection. I was quite impressed how many good-looking template there are in Spartacus alone, and we could improve the old ones as well to improve the selection as a whole further.
I also think that improvement of the structur of old templates, especially of default, would prevent new authors to go in the wrong direction. I for example built my own template on top of codeschmiede, which led to some issues with the tables.
If we agree we want to try that and that table-based templates should be ported to a modern div/css-stucture (or even html 5? Shall we also judge about the look? Who should do that - a new-to-build design-council?), then we could go the following route (which, as i admit, is work-intensive and needs a lot of diplomacy):
1. Contact the original authors and ask for improvements, explaing the situation with s9y 2.0 and the exact issue with the specific template.
2. See for all templates the original author is not interested in fixing wether there is someone else to improve it.
I for example have a modernised and div/css-based version of codeschmiede in use on my own blog.
2.5 Maybe even have a blogpost about that and inform about templates which miss a maintainer
3. After quite some time, before the release of s9y 2.0: Decide for every template still not improved wether to remove it from spartacus or not.
Only a suggestion. I fully accept if your opinion is "we don't want to control the template-selection that much". Otherwise, i surely would try to help with that project.