It's too bad that the quality of the themes in extend isn't so hot. Almost all of the best plugins are in extend though. I think this illustrates how different the business models are between themes and plugins, or maybe programmers are generally more committed to Open Source than designers.

The quality of the theme directory is slowly improving though with the addition of themes like
Alex King's Carrington and Brian Gardner's Shades of Blue (and Justin's own contribution). Hopefully more talented designers will contribute in the future.

I would like to see some more quality control as well. I think it would be bad for the community if they turned people away because their themes "looked bad". But if they enforced a higher standard of quality for the code, I think that the end result would be better looking themes.

And they need a better way to filter the bad ones and promote the good ones, just going of the number of downloads doesn't seem to be doing the trick!