Mint theme customizations

[bra|10n]

Hi All,
I've essentially registered here primarily to ask the following questions.
I like most have heard about the extra efforts made by the Mint teams aim to provide a more uniform and consistant looking o/s.
So if I might ask;
To what extent does Mint customize the standard KDE experience?
Is this more than providing additional colour-themes and icon-sets for the desktop, or do the maintainers dig into KDE applications also?

And another question;
What is the default package manager used in Mint?

TIA for any information.