I understand what you are saying, but IMHO it's overkill. I actually remove quite a few classes from the stock Threads templates because there isn't any sense in using the same class three layers deep in a template -the first declaration of it is all that's needed (inheritance will take care of the rest).
As for making the buttons different: Uniformaty is an asset of a well designed web site -the only time I've see radicle color designs is on "ranbow bright" web sites and I have no intention of scripting for them
Look at my site,
www.dalantech.com , and see what I've done just by simply adding wrapper graphics to the tbopen and tbclose templates and adding a gradient to tdheader...
