No, but they were also created for the previous OS. Not merely the previous release of the OS, a totally different OS.

>Furthermore, an awful lot from those days had recently been touted as “the future”, encouraging developers to invest more heavily than they might have otherwise

Sure, that was bad. But that was the last steps of a dying company, and probably touted as such before Jobs and co took the helms. The decision to drop lots of existing stuff and focus on a totally new platform is what turned the fate of the company around. At least in retrospect we can say it worked great, even if there were some casualties along the way.

Compared to the theme API, I'd more lament Yellow Box (which was a NeXT based technology anyway), and perhaps WebObjects (ditto, and ahead of its time).

That said, I really liked the "Platinum" (I think was the name) OS 8 look, and used to mimic it on Linux through cheapo wm themes.

(which, in the case of 8 and 10, is close to no style, little more than lines on solid rectangles.)

Honest question: how simple would this have been considering the fact that they switched to an entirely different OS, as coldtea points out?