Unfortunately I don’t have any knowledge of PHP and limited CSS knowledge and would like to add a custom color scheme. I am wanting to use a child theme so I can isolate my customization from any theme updates, so the idea of modifying the array directly seems counterproductive. That leaves trying this use of the “avf_skin_options” filter. And here is the issue: I have no idea what you are talking about, and am quite confused by the link to the codex page you referenced. Can you please explain?

Also – I tried simply editing the register-backend-styles.php by picking one of the predefined styles we wouldn’t ever use and swapping out to our custom theme, and then putting that file in the child theme folder. Seems a bit naive, but I thought any files with the same name got overwritten by those in the child theme folder. Didn’t work! (“If you want to change more than just the stylesheet, your child theme can overwrite any file in the parent theme: simply include a file of the same name in the child theme directory, and it will overwrite the equivalent file in the parent theme directory. For instance, if you want to change the PHP code for the site header, you can include a header.php in your child theme’s directory, and that file will be used instead of the parent theme’s header.php.” …from this page: http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes)

So, any help would be greatly appreciated!