Theme Guidelines

So I've delved into the depths of h- many forum threads and found the 'lovely' nitty gritty of why so many themes don't work on SM5 B4. A little saddening vs the theming community side, but clear enough. So my question is in relation to what rules, spoken or unspoken, are there for altering themes? Say I found a really nice one that someone made, but it say..crashes, what would be the method of fixing it? I ask because I've worked in modding communities before. I know some authors (and the community as a whole) are all for things being made right, so long as the work isn't simply stolen. Then I know others where it's considered very poor practice to use anyone else's work, and preferred if you simply make your own/start from scratch.

If you're a good programmer, I think you'll probably be better off just taking the images from the theme and throwing the rest away. At least then what you make will make sense to you and be well written. (I might be making an unfair assumption about the code quality of the theme, but I haven't seen a theme that didn't make me cringe from poor practices like code duplication and lack of abstraction (except for the themes made by currently active devs))

I don't really know what the community view is, and there are probably a dozen or so subcommunities inside stepmania, with varying views on the issue. This forum is rather low traffic, so if you're only releasing the result here, don't worry about it. If you're planning to release on another forum as well, ask there.

And if the "custom theme" is based off of DDR or PIU or PIU Pro graphics, then the author doesn't really have room to complain in my book. They took the base from someone else, so they shouldn't complain when the next person down the line does the same thing.

Alright, thanks. I'm not great at programming - most of my experience comes from Lua script ala Geyser in a MUD client called Mudlet, but I just might take a shot at this. For now I'm just considering if it's a possibility, and seeing what I have to work with. Knowing how much work it likely is, the fact that I have my own full custom GUI that I support for Mudlet, and having a full time job, I'm leaning away from a year or more worth of work in making a theme from scratch.

I wouldn't be working on Stepmania stuff at all if I had a full time job. I've had all the features I really want for several months.

If you're lucky, the theme you're trying to fix might only take a few hours to fix all the mistakes, plus however long it takes for you to understand how the theming system works well enough to fix the mistakes.
Or you might find that they duplicate the same piece of code to create an actor 15 times in one file, and the only difference is the position. And then there's a second identical file for the other player. (I have actually seen this happen, and it multiplies the amount of time it takes to fix an error when the broken piece of code has been copy pasted like that)