Why are the discussion styles all so different?
I'm not really expecting an answer, but I just need to vent a little...
We are new to Lithium, having just migrated a 250k+ user community from Jive to Lithium. One thing that I have found very frustrating when styling the community is that each "discussion style" looks like it was implemented in total isolation, with very little consistency with respect to page elements and HTML structure. Sometimes the author details are above the title, sometimes below. Sometimes the author details aren't present at all. Sometimes you can reply or give kudos to a comment, sometimes you can't. Even the rendering of things like attachments, tags, and labels following the message/article body might render in different order, or different styles, or with different HTML elements. This makes styling a community so time-consuming.
What gives? Is there a reason for this? I can certainly imagine that this makes professional services contracts more lucrative, but I think a little TLC and coordination between Dev and UI/UX would be much appreciated by customers doing skinning in-house. As a dev, I would say this violates DRY principle (don't repeat yourself). As a UI/UX person, I would say it violates affordance consistency. Imagine if every room in your house placed the light switch in a different place and at a different height?