In reply to bb.

No, not necessarily.

If you want to continue to think and operate within the current WordPress paradigm, then you'd be correct. But the point of this is to break out of the restrictions of that paradigm.

So someone like Dave Bell, for example, who wants to build a lot of restaurant sites, doesn't have to load the original WP crud only to have to then also load a plugin to turn it all off. (And then he'd have to spend time configuring the plugin to get the type of back-end he really wanted to start with in the first place.)

What Schuller's approach could lead to, in another words, is a variety of alternative back-end solutions (not just themes that claim to prettify the admin but actually just add to the clutter). In fact, this would make WordPress even more modular than it currently is. So far as I am concerned, the more modular, the better.