If I'm honest, think XenForo has the best looking default style of them all. Burning Board comes next after XenForo for me. But XenForo still has the edge on best look. The two things I don't like most about XenForo. Alerts Link - You hover over the link and it shows alerts briefly and then closed. So you end up having to click the link again. Sign Up - Very confusing I think is the method used to sign-up with a new account. Most new users to forums would be totally confused on how to create a new account at first. Because you're presented with the log-in box after clicking sign-up and have to tick the register field to move to sign-up page. Very bad how that works I think, not new user sign-up friendly at all. Latest Topics - Only having latest topics by default is terrible. Because once you read a thread listed in it - then it gets removed from list (as it should do). But then trying to find that same thread again on forums (browsing them) to re-read the topic because link is removed from latest topics until another reply is made (is a nightmare). Why isn't it like phpBB, in that you also have a recent topics link to show all latest ones, even read ones to quickly jump to topics just read. Only having that Latest Topics isn't good enough for making browsing the forum user friendly.
^^ I agree both forums I look after have two themes each and I have to remember to add "recent posts" when ever I update the styles just to make it sensible imho, and the alerts are great apart from as GTB states above, also if you hover just to far to the left once the pop up appears it forces you on to the PM Box which gets kind of annoying after a while.