Re: BP needs to Focus on Child Themes
I think the separation between BP’s default theme and the BP code is pretty good, actually. It’s not perfect
Yep it’s not perfect, it suffers from being too tied into the default theme, something I queried when 1.2 changed the location of the default theme to nestle within the BP core files – an odd thing for a theme in some senses.
This aspect has been raised though and there is no immediate short term answer, true and proper separation of model/controller from views or mid tier from presentational layer is doubtless a while off yet (Mr Mazz alludes to this aspect in his inner/internal thoughts section of the nextGenAPI paper)
It took WP an absolute age to get to a stage where it was possible to truly write themes with no fear that each and every upgrade would break custom themes and require hours of work to bring back into line, anyone who was trying to work with WP pre 1.5 era will remember the nightmare fondly 
At the moment writing true themes (not simply skins) is a somewhat problematic issue the core can and will and does break your custom themes and involves having to trawl through presentational files finding those changes; this isn’t good and makes it difficult to have confidence in truly creating a theme – however the fact is that the default theme is actually pretty good, creating a child theme from it works pretty well, it will still break and you will still need to find those changes to theme files and transpose them to your child theme file copies, but generally that shouldn’t involve huge amounts of changes.
Issues need to be addressed but take heart that BP is a million miles ahead of where WP was at this stage and nowhere near as frustrating but you need to have lived through those early WP days perhaps to appreciate that
