@Reneé Klein - There is nothing wrong with flying by the seat of your pants. I learned how certain parts of WordPress work by breaking stuff when editing bits and pieces of code. It's one of the ways I discovered how WordPress works without needing blocks of PHP code to get anything done. Over time when messing with themes, you'll get to learn CSS selectors and contributes like Background color and such. I would start here http://codex.wordpress.org/CSS if you're not comfortable editing CSS.

@Ryan Hellyer - I think there is still a market for something like CommentBits. For example, MaxFoundry started a business based on buttons that has been very successful for them. CommentBits would be pretty cool once there were about 50-100 different comment form designs. I would be worried a little bit if someone came along and created a Comment form generator that spit out all of the correct code where you just upload the files into a theme and boom, there's the comment form you created. However, all of this almost seems like a moot point because wouldn't the commenting area already be designed by the theme author to match up well with the rest of the theme?

@Richie_KS - Editing the way comments are displayed used to be as simple as editing a few files. A recent version of WordPress changed it so that a bunch of commenting stuff was added to comment_form.