How can they be nice? They look pretty, thats how they can be nice lol... Sure, alternating row colors help with looking left to right, but if you have more than 20-30 rows you really need to worry more about your search engine rankings than row coloring
...
One thing to keep in mind though is that just because you don't like one behavior, doesn't mean someone else wants to loose that behavior...
For example, I really enjoyed the row highlighting for new posts that threads had, but can understand why it hasn't been added back yet, but I definitely would not like this feature on my forum (as color matching for yet another set of rows doesn't really do well for conformity and just adds too much additional colors to deal with; in my opinion) but I can see how others like this behavior (it's a neat feature) but I for one wouldn't be interested whereas I know Ian and several others would love it.
