I agree with some of the other posters, the theme for the current Surgemail is just fine. I think their resources could be put into other areas, like functionality improvements. Rather then NetWin hire a designer which might result in an increase of the software price for everyone, why don't you hire a graphic designer yourself to design a skin that suits your needs? If it turns out good, then you could sell that theme back to the Surgemail community and make your money right back (since you say a lot of people want a new theme). That way everyone wins.

In my case, I was unhappy at Surgemail's lack of sync technology support.  Once I found out that was not something they were looking to fix anytime soon, I went out and found something that worked for me. Using a webmail replacement (with sync technology) has turned out to be a great solution for myself and customers to replace any functionality I felt was missing from the current software. So I got to keep Surgemail running at the core which I think it does a good job at, and then bolted another webmail software interface on top.