The point of a framework is that you're supposed to build on top of it. Expectedly, color would be one of the first things anyone would change. Though the spacing issue itself might be difficult to address. Looking at the SASS files, _Color.sass has the values you'd need to modify in one place and _Spacing.sass might take care of the other issue.
I'm not going to tweak something that is "dead on arrival".
It has to be usable first with zero configuration; then the integrator gets excited and is inspired to weak.
What I like about this is the idea of a generic style sheet that just works with standard elements. It's successful in that basically it worked for me as designed; it applied its style to all the elements. Only, its idea of style is to make the fonts a bigger, and turn a simple table into something that needs scroll bars in both dimensions.
I would definitely like to try some other "just drop it in" stylesheet like this. Or maybe this one too, six months from now. Or its emerging forks (the project encourages forking).
Hmm, I agree that zero configuration would be ideal, but everyone has different needs. Design can especially be opinionated, with a person deciding "this is how this should be done." Of course picking a purple color doesn't help at all in that matter (I assume it's a reference to bootstrap's default color) and one person's minimal styling is another person's obtrusive styling. It's been a while since I've personally tried it, but Skeleton might be worth a try; it's quite minimal.
Okay; I took the Skeleton CSS and gave that a try. It had some issues but I plunged into tweaking. In the end, I got a good-looking result. But that end result could be obtained with probably some 20 odd lines of way simpler CSS.
* Didn't like the scatter-brained mixture of units used in this CSS. Some things are given in pixels, others in rem. This is annoying because when the user zooms, the pixel stuff won't scale, but the font-relative will.
* Elements are arbitrarily given display styles for no good reason. For instance, a checkbox is "block" displayed. I have some checkboxes in a table, and this caused them to align squarely to the upper left of their cell, not obeying the vertical-align coming from the table.
* Some elements are given spurious inner padding or margins, so they cause extra space. Tables blow up because of this. I had to hunt this down and kill it.
* Speaking of tables, the CSS has a rule for TD and TH that text is left-aligned. Firstly, why when that is the default? This caused a middle align given inline in the table itself to be overridden. I had to hunt this down and remove it to re-enable the middle alignment in a table column.
* The h1, h2, h3, ... guys were sized way too large. The author of Skeleton seems to think that the purpose of headings is to have a crescendo of font sizes, whereby h6 is normally sized, and things get geometrically bigger from that, culminating in h1 being a billboard on an interstate freeway. This is not the case. The h elements are for document structure. While you don't want h<n> to be smaller than h<n+1> it doesn't always have to be bigger. Styling can use other clues to indicate the hierarchy to the user, such as depth of section numbers or indentation. And who the heck even uses h6 and do they really still want that heading to be smaller than h3, h4 and h5? Needless to say, I had to tweak all those sizes.
In the end I got a nice appearance, but still with way too much left-over cruft for what is supposed to be a minimal CSS skeleton. So I put this into a branch for later contemplation, and reset my master branch back.
That later contemplation probably won't take place, and so this was a waste of the better part of an hour.
Which tends to confirm my earlier view: don't spend time tweaking something that isn't approximately right as-is.
