Changing the theme is not the same as having one

Something I have been turning over since I argued in the Mac thread that appearance does not repair piece by piece the way behaviour does.

What I left out there is the uncomfortable half. Applying one look everywhere means accepting that some things end up worse. There are always two or three applications on my machine that will not take whatever I have chosen, and the honest choice is to leave those looking wrong rather than patch each one back toward the default. I run Curtains and I have held the same style for about a year now. My mail client is uglier than it was. The desktop as a whole is mine, which it was not before.

This is where I expect to be told I am wrong. A good part of this forum is people trying something new every few weeks, and I understand the pleasure in it, but a desktop changed that often is not a look, it is a sequence of looks. Nothing is given time to become invisible, and what I am after is to stop noticing my desktop at all. That takes months rather than days.

The obvious objection is that collecting is the hobby and living with one choice is only housekeeping. I would accept that, except that the desktops I remember from this forum are the ones somebody kept for years.