Other people have mentioned why mood theme creation for free users wouldn't be a good idea -- much, much fewer people use multiple custom mood themes than multiple custom styles, so it would essentially be completely removing a paid account incentive, as opposed to giving free accounts limited access to advanced customization but reserving the bulk of what people are doing for paid accounts. I will point out, though, that if you've got a mood theme that meets our basic guidelines -- the copyright to all images owned by you and not a derivative work, no bigger than about 30px by 30px, separate images for as many individual moods as possible, and keeping to our Diversity Statement (such as by not assuming that the 'default' color for human skin is white) -- that you're willing to license to us, we'd love to have it :)

We definitely want to bring back the Schools directory -- we had it for a while, but had to turn it off, actually; the code support is still there -- but the problem is that the administrative backend is so labor-intensive, and the dataset that came with the LJ install we forked from was so dirty, that to clean it up and make it usable would've taken hundreds of person-hours. We've got a bug open to re-spec it so that it won't have so much administrative overhead, but it's going to be tough enough that it definitely won't be in the next few months.