My taste more or less parallels yours. I find that what changes things radically is the wall behind the WB. Rotating them tends to make the WB more interesting for me.

I wonder how many folks enjoy the darker WB's vs. the more colorful?

Maybe a survey could inform us all more about the tastes of the folks here at WC?

Darker for sure!!!!  

i like darker skins

I think the wallpaper is really the foundation in which we choose how we skin.  I see why the aero skin is popular because it's clean and simple.  Great for everyday use.  The only time I use a blind that is complicated is when I want to put a nice screenshot together.  Other than that clean and simple is what I think most go for.  In fact, did we not have a poll at one time that measured this among this community?  I believe it showed that most people preferred simple and clean over all others.   So it’s no surprise to me that the aero styled them would be most popular.

Personally I have no clue at all why aero style skins are popular. I don't find them simple and clean.

Objectively I know that people have different taste, so I'm not gonna hate you for liking it.

When I first got my Vista, I actually thought there wont be a need to change skins ever again but yet there was still room for improvement and soon I learned of some of the best modds that could be applied to Vista like having a rounded taskbar corners, removing the ugly cloudy background of the title frames, getting rid of those ugly blue backward / forward buttons and replacing them for better ones and so on...