Synthesis will very likely stay for vB3, but I've been working on a fresh forum theme as well. The postbit (posting area) is pretty much done, but any very innovative ideas for the forumhome itself would be nice. Of course, making the actual browsing fast and easy is a priority that comes before actual looks.
Even if I'd get the crazy idea to, say, hire 2advanced to create a forum theme which shows a 20 second flashy movie sequence when you want to open a thread, it'd hardly effective for a number of reasons.
"Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today." - Stephen Wolfram