Wedge

ColorBox seems to be the best according to my tests. It can also be turned into a draggable component.
Also, PrettyPhoto is among the lightboxes I'm planning to evaluate, along with YoxView (less interested with this one though.)

The problem is I need a thumbstrip(Similar to what Highslide does) but Highslide is too fat. I plan on replacing 56KB of uncompressed JS(jQ.ui.dialog and jQ.fancybox) with whatever I find most similar and better in terms of features.

Dunno then.

You gotta be F***ing kidding me..of all the jQ lightboxes the only one which implements thumbstrip is PrettyPhoto and that too is very ugly. *me goes to code his own*. Anyone wants? :P

Very ugly? I don't know what you want but I find it very nice...

I don't know, it isn't as appealing as highslide.

Seems better than it in every respect, except for the lack of draggable...?

I ended up using highslide(Replaced jquery ui dialog and fancybox with it), I couldn't find a better alternative(My JS size remained more or less the same after gzipping and compression using google closure).

The one thing with Highslide is the licensing is a bit of a pain, they actively discourage anyone wanting to pay for commercial licences in favour of their free options.

I don't think I follow, why would highslide discourage someone to pay to them and favor free things?

Well, back when I was working on SimpleDesk, I approached them about getting a commercial licence for SD for its attachments, because I figured anyone using SimpleDesk, strong chance it's for something vaguely commercial which doesn't fall under their free licence.

So I asked them how I'd go about paying for a licence to distribute HS with SD, suitably for commercial uses - and they told me that it wasn't necessary and that all I had to do was make it clear at point of use that it wasn't free for commercial use (like Aeva does)

So you wanted an unlimited commercial license whereas they told you to not do that and instead let it be webmaster's responsibility? I actually prefer the latter option since you save your money(I see them billing quite a good amount since they can't be sure on how many sites your software will be used).

Point is, they didn't even mention it that way (even though the unlimited commercial licence seems to be $179)

Yeah, you could've taken the commercial unlimited license.