From the “Kool-aid lover’s” department:
I’m glad Jonathon Delacour (with the help of Mark Pilgrim) got CSS working on his Radio weblog, but I still agree with Camworld. It’s not that Userland templates prevent users from coming up with a good design, but rather that Userland users don’t. For whatever reason, I think there’s definitely a greater sameness among Radio/Manila blogs than among Blogger blogs. Maybe part of that is simple laziness; give users a usable-but-not-necessarily-stellar template, and they’ll stick with that mediocre solution. I think a bigger part of it is that default calendar table in Userland products that just “brands” every Userland blog.
I’m impressed that Jonathon got CSS working in Radio. It reminds me that, at some point, I have to do something about the design of this site — which is a horrible amalgam of tables and some CSS. Ugh.
Addendum, ten minutes later: Steve Pilgrim, a total web development newbie, bursts the bubble of Radio usability for the true mainstream consumer (e.g. the ones whose only web development experience is via Microsoft FrontPage). At least Dave Winer acknowledges it. In a way, this is akin to my earlier comments. Even though I can throw acronyms around with the best of ‘em, I’m still really only looking for a tool that lets me post to a blog from anywhere. Radio might be risking getting lost in it’s own hype around the scripting/web services side of the tool.