It think it's great that template designers are available to help bring something different to what the default template has to offer. Though it must be difficult for them to offer support on all their templates when ever a new upgrade of dolphin comes out.

I chose the other option of adjusting the default template. I have changed colours of lines, backgrounds, fonts etc etc, to create something that inevitably looks similar to the original design but still something of my own creation. I chose see more this path because the more changes you make, the more difficult it is to upgrade to a newer version. I started with Dolphin at v5.3 and going from 5.3 to 5.4 for example was not really a problem, but from v5.6 to v6.0 and then from v6.5 to v7.0 was quite an undertaking.

Though it may prove to be a challenge, it is also an opportunity to bring a new lease of life to your website by introducing some new design changes while trying to maintain a similar look to what you had previously as the one thing I have noticed is that your members do not actually like too much of a change.

My recommendation to make changing the default template a much simpler process is to learn the basics of HTML and CSS and to get a program such as Adobe Photoshop to assist you in making changes to the images in the default template. Though before applying any change, have a backup ready to go of the CSS, HTML or image before of what you had before the change in case something goes wrong and you need to quickly revert back to what you had.