edit: from the large number of votes I'd say many people feel strongly about this, feel free to comment if you want to voice your opinion about Garland.
Was just thinking of creating a new free color module theme for Drupal 7.
Garland is very popular but perhaps people have seen enough of it. There is a strong argument for keeping Garland and doing a simple make-over: Garland is a part of the Drupal brand, it's what Drupal looks like out of the box and updating* it could be an easy and value-adding move to Drupal core (Maybe for 7.1 or as a contrib option?).
If I were to start anew I (or we - would love to work together with someone on a theme) could make something with some more flashy graphics and the popular lighting effects** decoration looks like an evolved style of what Garland does:
This could yield a cooler theme that has the similar marketing value to Drupal that Garland had 3 years ago, or it might turn out to be a bridge too far in terms of flashyness and thus not be as popular as Garland.
Creating such a graphically intensive theme would also take about 3 months for me as opposed to 4 weeks for a proper Garland update. Also, I can't get anything done in time for a Drupal 7 release candidate because of my schedule @ university.
Just playing with ideas and checking for animo.
* Adding animated dropdowns, extra regions, Skinr integration, fixed/fluid/sidebar width theme settings etc. etc. Like the drupal themes at my site.
** like http://newism.com.au/ or http://www.strutta.com/
