I think that the most important motivation behind new skinning system was that assets imported from Flash CS aren't editable / aren't fully editable in other editors commonly used for Flex framework. Since new skins are all in plain text, they eliminate this restriction. However, several important advantages of previous system were lost. The preview at the time of developing the skin is very important, but no tool exists to fairly preview Spark skins until they are actually used. For reasons beyond my comprehension, the skins had to inherit from UIComponent. Combined together these two disadvantages are a show-stopper for many projects / workflows.
Now, the problem with promising that this is going to be fixed any time is that: - If we want to consider some graphic tool for designing the GUI, what tool should it be? - New skinning system is the most significant change in Halo to Spark transition, if it is dropped, then there's basically no reason to use Spark at all. So, patching Spark components in attempt to alter the way they use skins would be a major rewrite anyway. - There isn't any solid plan, neither less solid goals or even intentions expressed as about what would be the priorities of Apache version of the framework, so I don't think there may be a reasonable answer. Maybe this will be addressed, maybe it won't be, maybe the problem will perish because of the development taking a completely different turn... Best. Oleg
