You say the URL rewriting serves absolutely no purpose but that's absolutely incorrect. One of the biggest features of the theme is cleanliness in the code, and that includes getting rid of things like /wp-content/ in URLs.

See https://github.com/retlehs/roots/issues#issue/5 regarding all your complaints on the theme settings -- you can do this if you'd like... I've made the issue aware since release that the settings need to be replaced.

And yes, the default WordPress output of 'automatic-feed-links' is dirty along with several other things. The goal is to get as much minimal [HTML5] code output as possible.

Don't like it? Fork it..