In reply to Ben.

Yeah, I've started with _s several times, but always end up stripping out everything that _s provides and having a completely custom theme.

And I'm suggesting a blank canvas, though, but instead a theme that by architecture is easy to augment with the types of changes that are commonly needed, such as logos, colors, fonts, etc.. A "framework light" if you will, one that wouldn't be WordPress core but could be semi-standardized because it would be included in a core plugin, maybe.

What do I mean specifically? A bunch of functions like comments_template() that create a structure around comments so that not everything has to be rolled from scratch.

For example, why isn't there a common function to generate the HTML header? Or how about a content_page() function?

BTW, I'd love to see WordPress add static methods a WP_Theme class for this, something like:

<?php
WP_Theme::the_header();
WP_Theme::the_content();
WP_Theme::the_fooder();

FWIW.