Hey there,
I just joined the community a few weeks ago. However our team is with Drupal around 1 year. Not really active yet but we want to be closer with you guys and get your honest and direct feedback about our work.
First of all we have recognized that theming, styling in Drupal needs a longer learning curve compared to other CMS. Yes yes, I know this is the same thing for every new technology, thing you learn needs time. However the process itself is quite annoying, so we saw this problem and have developed Nucleus http://drupal.org/project/nucleus.
Again a new base theme? Yes, we have checked the most used base themes (Fusion, Zen, etc.) and they don't really provide what we needed. So we build a new one from scratch. We thought don't stay with the status-quo and do something different.
You are welcomed to use it, test it, crash it, fork it, improve it whatever needed to create a base theme which simplifies the theming process. So don't be nice, give us straight forward feedback ;)
We published also 4 free Drupal themes here on drupal.org so you can use Nucleus on Theme we already have built.
http://drupal.org/project/tb_simply