Dreamwidth style system discussion

I feel like such a failure.

I have a very nice layout on my LiveJournal page - clean and simple. Unfortunately the style (Miniml) is not available within Dreamwidth, and attempts on my part to recreate it or at least to build something similar are failing dismally. The limitations of the "customise style" pages are just about driving me to drink.

After numerous attempts with Tabula Rasa, all of them unsuccessful (including de-selecting "use layout's stylesheet" and copying the Miniml css into the box), I tried using Modish (Greyscale colour scheme) and changing all the background and font colours. This has had mixed success (you can see it here). I was able to get the page and module backgrounds to white, with white borders, so that it lookes a bit cleaner. However, I am unable to change the font weight for the page header (Alassenya) to bold, or the subtitle to italic, and for some reason I can't change the font colour for the page links at the left - they remain resolutely white (and thus invisible) until clicked on. I have tried using the "custom css" box to fix them but had no success.

So basically I have a two-tier question:
a. Is anyone able to devise a layout that resembles Miniml for DW?
b. If not, how do I resolve the font weight and colour issues in Modish?
Edit: partly resolved, I have the H1 in bold and H2 in italic, but I still don't have visible links at left.

I also have a supplementary question: how do I remove the number of uses from my tags list? I like it as a list, not a cloud, but I don't want the number of uses appearing next to each tag.