Mark Clements wrote:
Given that monobook is the only skin in MediaWiki that looks even slightly professional and modern, and given that it isn't particularly obvious how to create a new skin, it is no wonder that it is so prevalent. For the general public that use MediaWiki (i.e. non-WMF sites) some kind of style editor as described here would be a great tool and would hopefully alleviate the monotonybook woes. I'm not sure what, if any, benefit it has to WMF though.
One simple improvement would be to allow CSS/JS-only skins. The idea would be to get rid of the need to create a PHP skin file entirely, maybe you could just have a simple skin description file in the base skins directory. Then we could grab the whole [[m:Gallery of user styles]], put it into MediaWiki, and add an installer option to select a default skin from it.
-- Tim Starling