Should Consensual be packaged with 5.0.9?

(copy pasted from issue #666. Discussion can go either in this thread, or in the issue on github)

Some know this already: I'm working on a reskin of Consensual with the intent to bundle it with 5.0.9.
This issue is for people to discuss whether they're in favor or opposed, and why.

Reasons to do this:
1. (in my view) Consensual is the future of Stepmania's capabilities.
2. Default does not provide many advanced features, and even has some "simple" ones missing. Currently, people have to go to custom themes that are either not maintained, or poorly maintained to get features outside of default's range.
3. No active theme dev uses default? (not sure, midiman might be using default). Whenever someone asks devs what themes they use, each one is using their own custom theme. I believe that having no theme dev using default as their primary theme results in a lower quality theme.

Reasons not to do this:
Consensual does not support online mode, and I do not plan to implement that before the next release.
Izzy has expressed that he wants to make new compatibility breaking changes to online mode anyway, so that might not be a serious problem.

I can support this

I'm all for it. Assuming it's not replacing Default, I can only see benefits in having this included.

(copy pasted from issue #666. Discussion can go either in this thread, or in the issue on github)

Some know this already: I'm working on a reskin of Consensual with the intent to bundle it with 5.0.9..

Would it be possible to see screenshots of the reskin progress? :)

Anyway, I'm not seeing a downside to including the theme with 5.0.9. As long as there is some kind of documentation explaining how to use it for the newbie I'm all for it!

I was going to hold off until I had more work done on it, but the issue tracker forced my hand, so I had to announce early.
So far, I've only been working on the Select Music screen, and it's far from finished.
I included shots of gameplay and options to show what surround life looks like, and configuring the color used for the screen filter (which gets its tilt from being the notefield board, and me using distant).
Album on imgur

There's a huge readme packaged with the them already, which will have to be revised.
Practically all of the features can be safely discovered through experimenting. Find something in a menu and play around with it.

Notes:
The designer I'm working with hasn't sent me a color configuration yet, so the colors will probably be different. (related: I need to implenent a system for naming color configurations and assigning them to date ranges)
I play with a lot of extra info in the pane. Each element is individually configurable, and the default configuration will be different from what is shown in the screenshots.
I have all the gameplay flags turned on, and custom positions and sizes for the elements set.
Surround life is optional, normally the life bar is at the edge of the screen.
The score meter next to the life bar has tick marks for the various grades.
The error bar has a rendering bug I haven't figured out how to fix yet. Old entries fade to black instead of fading to invisible.

Side note:
The d3d renderer is broken in various ways, so stuff doesn't render correctly in it.
Anybody using the reskin will have to switch to the opengl renderer by editing their Preferences.ini.

Update: Not packaging Consensual reskin with 5.0.9 because I spent the last 10 days working on engine stuff instead of the reskin, and the reskin isn't going to be finished in time.
Plus, shakeshoda said on IRC that he doesn't want to bundle it in.

No.

I had a lot of problems with it, most of which were resolved by deleting the theme and going back to Default, but some of which persisted afterwards.

Main reason I think it's dangerous is that (even without adjusting any settings) it generates inflated percentage grades compared to Default, and you're stuck with those fake inflated scores in your stats.xml

even after getting rid of the theme.

Proof (same song):

Default: 257 W1 + 23 W2 = 97.35%
Consensual: 254 W1 + 26 W2 = 98.2%

How does it make sense that I did objectively better in Default, but Consensual gave a higher percentage grade for worse performance? I could understand it if I'd changed some scoring parameter, but I don't

think I did, at least not intentionally. The menus are so weird and janky that I can't be sure I didn't change something accidentally.

I had to spend an hour deleting everything I played in Consensual out of my stats.xml so I wouldn't be stuck with fake high scores forever. Yes, I should have made a backup before trying a shady-as-fuck theme.

I made a backup from yesterday, but I played some songs in Default today before trying Consensual, and manually editing out the Consensual entries seemed less onerous than fully reverting to that backup.

Fortunately a lot of the songs I played in Consensual didn't even save to my stats.xml for no apparent reason, or else it would've taken even longer to edit them out.

There should be a warning screen or something like "this theme generates fake inflated scores".

Other lesser problems (resolved by deleting the theme & never using it again):

1. When a toasty should activate, all judgements become Miss for several seconds for no apparent reason, except that they apparently don't count as Misses on the results screen?

2. Graphics are either actually glitchy or lame kitchy "look what a leet haxor I am" fake glitchy

3. Everything is all strange and ghetto.

4. no Screen Filter option = unusable theme

5. literally made me cry, seriously, I actually cried

6. Weird white horizontal bar across the screen during gameplay that doesn't seem to do anything.

7. Song sorting is really spergy

8. Like seriously, if a sperg made a theme it would probably be like this, I kept looking around for an autism=no option but of course there isn't one

9. Readme file is tl;dr

10. If you leave it alone for a few seconds it pops up a screen with stupid-high amounts of unhelpful gibberish

11. Probably the worst theme I've ever seen, including themes that do nothing but crash during startup, because at least those don't mess up your stats

the confetti is cool though