Making a theme is not as difficult as it would seem. Just get a simple, dependable theme (started with Symax from phar0e) then just slowly changed out things until they worked. Go through the modules you need, and the modules you like. If you have questions along the way (as I had many) people here are normally more than happy to help as are the module writers. So go for it. A theme is truly great when you made it yourself :)