Oh, come now. I totally get that theme admiration is subject to personal opinion, but I'd hardly call this or this "below terrible". As for "Besides, it runs only on large, power-hungry and !LOUD! boxes", please stop spreading FUD and trolling just because you don't like something.

I run XBMC on an ASRock ION 330 which is hardly a power-hungry beast and is far from large. I doubt it's completely silent as it does have a fan inside, but I've never heard it. If you want, I can plug my Kill-a-Watt in and tell you exactly how much power it uses while decoding a 20+ GiB 1080p video.

XBMC comes with full support for metadata scraping including posters and fanart. It even has addons to play all TED talks, numerous other media streams (including YouTube, which I care less about than the TED talks) and if you don't see a scraper you like you're free to implement your own. Most of the addons have a less than ideal interface, but they're getting better.

It may not be perfect, but it works perfectly fine for me. Aside from my opinion about the themes, everything I've said here is based on provable facts. You are free to dislike it, but please don't spread falsehoods that will end up guiding people astray. You're very vocal and opinionated and I'm sure you'd hate to think someone made a decision based on bad information because of something you said.