Confluence can be customized to a great degree when it comes to functionality. you can easily develop your own plug-in to do almost anything but, when it comes to customizing the look and feel, it is just not as good as it could be. Mainly because a lot of html is hardcoded inside the velocity macros files that editing them cause complicated patching problems when it comes to upgrading to newer versions.
Now, I think I have a solution (work around) for that problem that is extremely easy implement.
how about instead of hardcoding velocity paths inside the macro classes we use a property file to look them up. even better would be being able to pass in the velocity file key to the macro e.g.
{spaces:com.mycompany.macro.velocity.myowntemplate}
. So that if I can just append my own velocity template files to the end of the property file.