I would potentially be interested in designing an all-purpose touch-friendly theme (open-source, of course) for the community, using modern, lean class-based selectors, responsive design principles, with keyboard accessibility, targeting IE8+. The web has changed a lot in the past three years, and this project has to evolve to the mobile/touch environment or it's ultimately going to wither. Being sensitive to the developing world no longer means catering to IE6. Two billion people are going online in the next two years, and they're going to be on phones running standards-based browsers.
Coppermine's functionality is mostly there already, which is truly impressive. But the markup and CSS is pretty.... rough... With the news today that IE6 is now less than 5% of market share, it's now officially time to move on from some of these design patterns. I mean, hey… jQuery 1.3? really?
The biggest obstacle to modernization that I see is that a lot of the markup doesn't even supply class names. There are major page elements sitting in unclassed divs. There are anchor links that should really be marked up as buttons, because they don't point to an external page. And the class names that do exist are often bafflingly unsemantic. The "curve" theme (best of the bunch, so far, IMHO) uses way too many id's, creating an arms race of selector-specificity that makes author styling a pain. Last, but not least, there just way, way too many tables.
Digging into this fully would require the help of someone who understands the PHP templating structure of the project better than a new arrival like myself. If someone on the team is interested in going through with me and re-classing the markup structure in a couple dozen places, I could be interested in a writing a clean, responsive theme.
Thanks for reading.