Themes do look neat; should be useful for DMs still going by the book, who need a nudge to modify monsters. Also good for a grab-bag of adder-on abilities.
However, I dislike at least one notion there. The Death Fury attack power does two things I think are kinda bad. 1) It highly encourages you adding it to a brute. But, brutes have very weak attack bonuses - and it wants you to reduce that by an additional -2? Those attacks are going to whiff. 2) It limits the monster to basic attacks, which is going to make the thing even more boring. Granted, many brutes are just basic attacks (another issue I have), but still. I get the idea they're going for, but it just leads to more, well, boring monsters instead of interesting ones.
