Another great episode! I think Brian has the right idea, a contest for the new default theme. If Brian himself would submit an entry, I can imagine how many other top designers would do the same.

This would be a great way for more people to contribute to WordPress, rather than just having someone at Automattic knock out a new theme. If they said your entry has to meet these requirements, then add it to Extend with the tag "contest", not only would we get a spiffy new default theme, we'd get hundreds of excellent new themes in Extend as well!

But something tells me that Matt's comment that the future of WordPress themes "will be blue, with rounded corners" isn't entirely tongue in cheek...