@Ted Clayton - That is correct. Basically, themers have been setting categories on individual posts and then styling the output via CSS. At the end of the day, this is really all post formats do for us on the front end.

Plugins like Advanced Custom Fields and MasterPress are making post formats less and less useful, since they are solving the UI problems.

There is still a lot of room for a UI improvements during the post creation and edit process, but I don't see how post formats will help.

From a theming end, I understand how post formats help - basically we no longer need to hack front end display stuff (as noted above). But what end users want is a slick UI, which really has nothing to do with post formats.