You're but one of the many who fall into the "make everything pretty". Sure, it probably isn't too much work to slap on some newfangled jQuery widgets(like carousels, I hear that's all the rage right now), some distracting and very large stylesheets, and fluff it up.

But what would it achieve? Would more people suddenly feel compelled to contribute useful things to this site? And would you -- say you were a user of this site since it started -- be willing to learn a new interface? Probably not!
Besides, "ugly" is highly subjective. What you consider "ugly" I find anything but: it is functional, does not take forever to load, and has a high chance of working in many browsers. Find out how to apply custom CSS or what have you, and then you can make it look as you wish.

~Thomas~ 

"Excuse me for butting in, but I'm interrupt-driven..."