As noted in my blog post about SHJS at http://khopesh.com/blog/adam-katz-musings/lifetype-highlight
I condensed a few themes as a proof of concept, bringing desert down from 2.6kB to 1.5kB (desert.min is 2.0kB) and vim-dark down from 2.4kB to 993b (vim-dark.min is 1.8kB). Applying the same space-killing reduction used for the .min versions, my further-condensed vim-dark.min shrank down to 859b.
The trick is to get everything to default to normal font-weight and font-style, then override it as needed for each class. Group classes together to eliminate as much redundancy as possible.
I'll attach some examples that I think should help you do the rest of the themes ... though these were done by hand rather than with a script, so this might be more tedious than it's worth to do all of them by hand.
... of course, if these are actually created by a script in the first place, that might explain why it's less optimal. I haven't looked at the source distribution.
hand-reduced version of the desert theme, human-readable
hand-reduced version of the vim-dark theme, human-readable
hand-reduced and hand-unspaced version of the vim-dark theme, not human readable
My hand-minimization techniques and the attached files are all fair game for inclusion, GPL v3, etc. See also my other ticket #2959860