I think most of people will agree on the theme idea. The problem is about the most appropriate implemention. Example: The Gossamer solution is very nice because it's simple to use, but very hard to code. A complete rewrite of the w3t code will probably be needed.
An intermediate and temporary solution that doesn't imply a lot of work to Scream and let's him have time to find an appropriate solution is to consider the showflat (and showthreaded) scripts as scripts with embedded themes. This imply a theme folder with
- one version of showflat/showthreaded with left side view
- on version of showflat/showthreaded with top side view
On the basis of this idea we can imagine several themes. It's a matter of small hacks of the print/echo statements.
Another advantage of this solution, it doesn't hurt too much the hacks people have implemented.
