BuddyPress.org

I’m basically one-week new to BuddyPress and but I agree, right now, it’s a bit difficult to be theme agnostic since you have to provide the page templates yourself. We’re going to have to work with Andy and the other devs to find a way to start moving more toward the way WordPress does it:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy

This way your plug-in’s action, i.e. create new link, just uses the template framework’s create.php page and you don’t have to provide your own. Same with directories. There should be one directory.php file in a theme and every directory uses it.

Granted this is a huge task But maybe we can spur it via Links since Links is kind of the poster child for BP component plug-ins. I’m available to help hammer that out if any devs catch this thread.