It's been 2 years (?) since phpbb launch their css based style system. Go to their template section and what do you see? All the templates look the same. Sure forcing people to style with css is nice, but it's alteast 10x harder. You could probably be looking at 1000+ lines worth of CSS code and all the major web browsers to make sure they alteast look alright.
It'll be a whole year or two before we even see "unique" looking templates like you did with vb3.
I agree man...should have done better with the template system.