BuddyPress.org

chewbaker, it’s not really the job of a develper to supply the perfect theme to go with the software. Everybody wants something different anyways. Andy has created a brilliant starting point with the default theme and I don’t think it should be changed. He’s made it even easier to change things with the use of a parent theme, so I’m pretty confident that it’s not on any roadmap

BP is still in it’s beginnings. With time you will see a lot more child themes and probably a few parent themes from other people that might do exactly what you want. Either you wait for that to happen or you get your hands dirty and dive into the simplicity that is CSS. There’s loads of tutorials available on the net and a few really good ebooks that can get you started (search for o’reilly, for example).

As for your question, the two navigation bars are in files called userbar.php (the ‘me’ bar) and optionsbar.php. In the parent theme the call to these files are to be found in header.php all the way at the bottom surrounded by an if statement that tells the system to only display it on certain pages. You could move all three files to your child theme, delete the complete if statement in header.php and then include the call to userbar.php and optionsbar.php wherever you want them to appear. Any file you modify, though, you have to copy over to your child theme.

Happy experimenting!