I’ve been putting a lot of effort into my dashboard as of late. I use card-mod which generally gets the job done, but I am annoyed when the visual editors break due to yaml validation.
It should be time that the HA developers have an official card-mod/uix like integration for those that want to take it a step further past a theme. Home assistant out of the box isn’t going to win any awards for looks and there is no way to please everyone, but every component simply should support styling and allow good reusable styling overrides.