Gold, please?
 

After trying some of the more involved themes, I've gone back to the default UI because of loading times.

However, I would rather have gold embellishments than silver (the blue is okay, though). Is it possible for someone to do without having huge loading times?

That's odd. Iv'e never had my loading times affected by any UI Skin.

Neither have I :)

Myself, I have had an issue with load times. I do have an older computer where I play LOTRO some times. I found that if you use a heavily modifed skin that the load times are significantly longer than the default UI. This is because LOTRO has to load all the drawings and XML file before it loads the game. But on a respectable machine, the load times are about the same.

So if you were looking for a change without load times being affected. (If you are on an older computer). Just make a change to the elements that you are looking at most of the time. (The main toolbar, minimap, inventory bags etc.)

Other items like a different BIO screen background you wouldn't really need, You look at that screen maybe once a week :D.

*EDIT*

At first I thought this was for LOTRO, but I suppose DDO will handle the custom UI's roughly in the same manner.

When using the original skin, the game still has to load the images and xml.

I am a skinner and modder for a few games other than DDO and LOTRO.

Just throwing this out there on every game I have ever skinned.
Felgrath, is correct it does have to load the xml's and the alternative art work. 9/10 the artwork is much higher quality than the default art. Or opaque which taxes the system much more than anything because it has to "Re-render" as it were everything that is behind those window's and bars that have that transparent overlay.

On a low end system such as my laptop I run about 30-40 fps on VG:SOH which I admit isn't the best but with a clean simple black ui I run 75-80 so just simple changes to a ui will do much more than just fast load times it will help improve overall game performance on most "low end" machines.

But that's just my 2 cents. From personal experience.