With the new vb4, one thing thats good is you dont quite have to touch HTML at all unless ur tryin to restructure your forum drastically.. Pretty much everything can be controlled with CSS as each element is classified. Style vars is sort of helpful for newbie's but there still lot of work to be done on it and pretty sure by 4.1 stylevars will be much tighter, currently its a bit disoriented in my opinion, too much blank spaces in style vars and a bit too complex.
Just start with stylevars and move to CSS template you can pretty much edit complete vb4 with those 2.