Clean Styles?

[TMC2K]

Originally Posted by Aken

You could do almost that entire style just by changing the CSS.

I have a few questions for the designer types:

1. If someone can do a style like ubuntu, how much time would it take and what is the general cost for something like that.
2. What is the ettique for 'borrowing' a style from a site and doing some mods. Is it considered ok or will the designer get ticked off. I like some things about the style but would want to change some as well.
3. A dumb question about styles. I've noticed that some nice ones are made with tables instead of CSS. Is this due to vbulletin? Does it spit out its html in tables? Is it very difficult to do a site in CSS?

Thanks in advance.