How to convert vB3 colour schemes to vB4?

[Mukashi]

While my forum is rather large, we've always used relatively basic styles on our forums, mainly because the vast majority of our people have little knowledge (if any) of coding, or of CSS. Mostly of them make use of only small sets of colours in broad sweeping strokes, and we've always been happy for how easy it is to make a very uniform looking skin with a minimum of fiddling. I doubt any of our skins would have more than 10 colours different from the base skin, for a matter of fact. Most 5 or less if you're not counting font colours for Normal Link, Visited Link and Hover Link

Despite this however....we seem to be having an embarrassingly difficult time trying to convert these over. In fact, despite weeks of trying, since the first vB4 beta we installed to now (all thankfully on a separate test forum), we haven't even managed to get one skin to look right. We aren't even trying to make any template or image changes at this point, just to copy over colours. It's starting to seem that something only entered once in vB3 Main CSS needs to be entered ridiculous numbers of times in vB4's stylevars to achieve the same effect. While the system is very powerful, and allows greater levels of customization....we're honestly stumped for translating over a very simple skin that just doesn't need this kind of customization.

Has anyone else here had any similar issues? Has anyone here managed to find a way to translate basic colour schemes like these over painlessly? If not, would anyone have any advice for how we could reduce the pain and the burden in any way?