After following the "Customize N900 Conversations" thread and contributing where I could. I find that the experience offered by the modified messaging interfaces is still rather disappointing.
I feel that CSS is not up to the task on it's own because it does not allow things like gradients and the glass effect for the conversation bubbles etc.
Also, using the browser is not ideal because when effects such as shadows are added the interface becomes very slow even without background colors. (I commented out all entries for background color in the CSS files which automatically results in a white background)

How can we redesign or modify the messaging interface to make it visually appealing while keeping performance at an acceptable level?