In reply to Pat Hartl.

@Pat Hartl, it is part of why the UX sucks. A user might expect to have an inheritance, after all in many other things a child inherits properties of the father, but not in wordpress, and as you point out when you decide to handle it differently it is surprising in a bad way.

But without inheritance it means that if I have 200 pages of documentation I need to change the template for all of them instead of just the parent.