I'm not much into graphics and Photoshop, but i'm curious: How much time do you people spend on designing new Wordpress themes?
designing depends on inspiration and creativity.. could be an hour .. a day.. coding takes 48 hours max.
Nope. You have to create the design then code the HTML and put that into a WordPress theme. What I did though was I created my own HTML/CSS framework called Lycanthrope (if I have my way, expect an article about it on SitePoint) which I also happened to create a WordPress version of (that I will be giving away free of charge once I get the thing documented into a style guide/tutorial booklet). Pretty handy when you think about it.