Thanks for covering the new starter theme, Jeff. I'd love to get feedback from developers outside of our small group that has been working on this. This will help us catch things that we couldn't see being so close to the project.

I did want to address a couple of points from the post. These were my fault for not being clear when we chatted.

The News theme I mentioned is actually this one on WordPress.org.

Hybrid Core is a required dependency that's added via Composer (this is because WP has no real dependency management in core). When reading the post, it sounded like it was optional. The code from the framework is what powers the features in the theme.