I think I can speak for the developers when I say the core is so much different between 1.5 and 1.7 that the time it would take to develop for both is not cost effective. The only reason to even be developing with 1.5 now is if you have an extension that is a must have and is not yet ready or will never be migrated for 1.7. Otherwise it is a fools move to to be building Joomla! 1.5 websites when the latest release is stable and working great.
If you do some searching around you can find tutorials that will show you how to migrate a template from 1.5 to 1.7 and then just reverse engineer it to work with 1.5.