I stand by what I wrote regardless of whether you have seen such remarks before or not. And I am familiar with the mechanisms for packaging skins. But packaging skins was not my concern. Designing them visually in VS2008 was the topic of my post.
For those of us (1) who have patiently struggled over the years with all of the previous versions of Visual Studio, and (2) who do not want to spend additional money on various other expensive (or not-so-expensive) design environments whether DreamWeaver or whatever, Visual Studio 2008 now does provide a powerful design environment that is wasted (ie, not used or useable) when developing in the context of a dynamic "skin-injected" web application such as DNN.
For an entire open source project that focuses on separation of programming logic and visual design, and places emphasis on such separation, it should in fact be possible to develop the design (at least in part, if not in full) without requiring a live database-driven DotNetNuke installation dependent on all the programming logic because it does SLOW down development of the design and violates the spirit of being able to design the visuals without the functional programming logic.
If there is no VS2008 configuration currently available, or no alternative Default.aspx page as the test-bed to host the css style file while under development, then this alternative design style driver DefaultDesign.aspx page is something that should be considered and made available by the Core Team Members responsible for skinning. It should be more-or-less a corresponding page that uses or could use dummy placeholders for static dummy text on all of the key objects or key skin objects that are part of standard DNN installations. Such an alternative static DefaultDesign.aspx that matches as well as possible the normal dynamic Default.aspx would in fact enable proper use of the Visual Studio 2008 design environment for developing CSS style files and building skins in a much faster and more efficient manner (ie, independent of the database and a live DNN installation).
It would be nice if an appropriate Core Team Member for skinning the new version DNN 5 Cambrian would comment here and let us know if the new version will have any capability such as what I've described here to help speed development of skins.