I think that the new default theme should be extremely well documented - even if some of it's overkill, the loop or anything else.

I definitely think that creating a master "parent" theme way is a good idea; it makes things easier for developers - but at the same time, it should learn from the mistakes of all the major theme frameworks out there - to quote Dion Hulse, some of them are just plain "doing it wrong".

I think the emphasis should be more on writing good code over making it do everything - because it just can't do it. I think elastic is a smothering pile of crap, and that no one should touch it. Headway tried and failed at doing the same thing. There's plugins to do everything such as twitter or what have you. Kickass typography wouldn't be bad either - and something that looked stunning would rock. Matt Thomas probably has something up his sleeve for that.

All-in-all, I'm sure the core team will do a great job of implementing it, though.

I guess the real question - is is this going to spearhead the way for canoical themes?