DesireData has much more substantial and interesting changes than the colors and backgrounds. it is also, unfortunately, not at a fully usable state yet. Since there were 50,000+ downloads of the previous version of Pd-extended ( 0.38.4), I think it's worthwhile to spend a couple days to make Pd-extended work better while we are waiting for DesireData.
.hc
Sorry, I hope my tone was not discouraging; I most certainly support this.
It would be cool if you could document your changes, since I'd be interested in helping out. http://puredata.info/dev/GuiIdeas/ (I added some of the things from this thread just now)
By the way, Monaco on Leopard is rendering anti-aliased at 10pt again, so Pd-e looks great there out of the box.