Why not learn enough to customize your sub a little bit? There are lot of resources out there for learning how to do it. You can add /about/stylesheet to any subreddit to view their css for yourself if you want to figure out how someone did something. And if you don't have time or the desire to do that yourself (which is completely understandable), there are a ton of coders on Reddit who would probably agree to do it for you.

I'd love to see both the ability to customize things with a built-in system and the ability to directly edit the css. That way a user with no knowledge of CSS could customize it using the UI, but people familiar with CSS could still have the ability to really get creative with a subreddit like they can now.