Agreed, but I will take boring any day over the abomination that was MySpace. User-customizable styling only works when users have the taste and technical knowledge to use it appropriately.
I used to feel this way, but I've had a change of heart.
Why shouldn't someone be able to express themselves by having bright pink text on a bright rainbow-unicorn background? It's not my cup of tea, but I bet it makes a bunch of people happy.
The best solution, imho, would be to have user-styles enabled by default (these could be as ridiculous as people wanted), and then having a standard site-wide mechanism for reverting to the standard style (this would also shut down any background music or videos).
Reddit does this, and it works well. They allows subreddits to be styled as the mods like and give the user an option to disable the custom styling globally. The Reddit Enhancement Suite takes it one step further and allows subreddit specific toggling of custom styles.
User-customizable styling only works when users have the taste and technical knowledge to use it appropriately.
This is true of any privilege. If you take away some right to prevent misuses, you also prevent people from using it correctly. If you could style your Facebook page any way you wanted, 99% would look like crap. But 1% would be works of art. The current system prevents that 1% from ever existing.
(I could think of a million analogies for this. If cars were limited to going 35mph, then nobody would speed. But nobody would be able to drive someone having a heart attack to the hosptial as quickly as possible. 99% of the time, speeding is just some jackass in a hurry. But 1% of the time, it's essential for preserving human life. So it's allowed.)
