I thik one of the problems with some open source projects is that developers are the ones leading the project, sometimes they are only ones on the project, with no experience or training in design.

Drupal had this problem for a long time, a lot of the default themes were terrible because Drupal was/is not designer friendly.

It's not as simple as writing some code or even making some pretty pictures, you can't expect programmers to know everything a designer knows, that takes years of learning and hard work.

Anyway, I'm a web designer, I own a N900, I'd be more then happy to collaborate with someone some a project.

Send me a message.