I've opened up Matt's SytheFlat theme

I just want to point out that the theme you're seeing as SytheFlat is a pre-packaged XenForo theme called FlatAwesomeDark (Flat Awesome Dark - PixelExit.com). It is by no means something I created. The only modifications I made to it were changing the colors from red tones to blue tones.

Something important to understand here too... It's kind of hard to make a lot of modifications to themes because it then makes it very difficult to upgrade them later. SytheXen is stock XenForo with about 8 million tweaks/modifications (which is why it has some of the issues it does). If we use a pre-packaged theme like a FlatAwesome, we likely won't be making many changes to it because it will screw up the integrity of the theme. That and every time XenForo is updated, the skins have to be updated too to reflect changes in the forum software. It's difficult to manage those upgrades while preserving custom edits.

I'm all for continuing this dialog and looking into other options for styles because, frankly, I hate SytheXen. But I want to continue with us all on the same page about how the styles work and the complexities of making edits to them.