I missed this, but recently the WordPress theme held a survey as to what their priorities should be for the next release of WordPress. Their current thought are summarised as:

Right now, the lead developers are thinking the top priorities for 2.8 will be widget management, theme browser/installer and performance upgrades.

Those are pretty good goals from where I’m sitting and it was only a matter of time before themes went down the route that plugins have gone. I’m not seeing the right amount of traction around their theme directory yet, certainly not as much as the plugin directory has had. I don’t know if that’s just a matter of time or that theme designers follow a different mind set to plugin developers. I certainly hope to see less theme clones (you know, where someone takes an existing theme, swaps the header image to one of Votive candle holders for example, and markets it as a brand new theme) and maybe having a centralised directory will help that issue.

I’ll let you know as soon as the results of the survey have been published.