In reply to hnla.

hnla, if you are only editing a few files then I agree you can move a few templates over but when you do extensive BuddyPress customizations it is better to have everything maintained in a plugin. Yes, some styles won't correlate with other designs. That's not the point on the framework. Clients generally ask for the same things, "we want Facebook, we want a two column profile" etc. This is a way to have those things reusable. You can take the base framework and then code and design it into different types of base sites that you can reuse on later projects.