Hey Jeff,

I'm skeptical that any replacement admin themes will gain significant traction, be reasonably complete, and will then continue to be maintained. I've seen that movie before, and its name is Drupal.

Building an admin theme is not a trivial undertaking; just look how much time the WordPress team spends on making changes to a subset of the admin. And general compatibility with existing plugins is simply not possible.

I do expect a lot of admin themes to be started, but few to be completed. And I doubt any will ever reach more than say 0.01% of installed users, and that's only if the best one is free. And without wide adoption, they will get no 3rd (4th?) party support, training, etc.

Further, an admin theme is candy, not a pain killer, at least not for most users. If they are asked to pay for it, IMO most will say "Nevermind." Of course a custom admin theme that is tied into a specific product where the product has significant business value could see major adoption, but that's a different animal. That admin theme would not be competing on it's merits alone.

Lastly, I also think that front-end admin is not viable on a generic basis. Building admin functionality into a theme requires significantly more development time and developer skill, so most choose not to do it and/or simply don't have the skills to. Same thing happened with Drupal that will happen in WordPress. That's why most Drupal themes are not admin themes, and the other reasons are why there are so few admin themes for Drupal.

JMTCW.

-Mike
P.S. However, I would love to see a new admin that uses pretty permalinks. But I digress...