In reply to Summer.

Nope. That has goes wayyy back to Kubrick at least, then Twenty Ten, Twenty Eleven and so forth all followed suit.

I'm not sure why people prefer the approach, but it seems to be very popular that is for sure.

The problem was the guy seemed to be a pretty decent PHP coder, but he knew zip about WordPress… something that I seem to be running across more and more and I haven’t the faintest idea why.

I think many people just never sit down and figure out how WordPress templates work. They copy the default themes and assume that is the only correct or even only way to do something, which can result in some truly horrid messes some times. It gets even worse when people try to make some Frankenstein child theme, so you end up with the parent theme and a child theme full of all sorts of garble making a diabolical mess which makes no sense to the original developer let alone any other poor sucker stuck trying to work on it.

The worst examples I see, are usually of a child theme, but with a custom parent theme. Some developers clearly miss the entire point and concept of the parent/child theme concept.