you have good taste. i really like aqua, except for the stripes. you really don't realize how bad the stripes are until you've used smoothstripes for a while and then you see a stock machine. max has also done an excellent job of filling in the gaps where apple has neglected to update the interface (in some cases it's still using 10.0 elements). ss offers jaguar style finder buttons, scroll bars, and widgets. i really hope that apple gives us a smooth variation some time soon, or at the very least fixes all of the ugly remnants from the dark ages.