I've also stuck with Julian's original - not because of Danny's design choices, but because I already built the child theme off that one and I haven't had chance/inclination to update it the way it might need doing now that Danny's version is created as a child theme of Bas' bootstrap3.
If/when Bas' bootstrap3 goes into core then I may change direction, but I like using my own child of the chosen parent theme (often a 3rd party contributed one) and I'm not overly keen on that parent theme then being a child of another 3rd party contributed theme. That is not a slight on any of the excellent developers involved in either of these projects, its just a step to far for me to justify maintainability and upstream continuity with the people I do the work for 
I don't really want to take on ongoing development of Julian's Elegance theme as it is however, given Danny's excellent work and the decision not to rename his theme. I understand his reasoning, but to me it blocks further development of the original Elegance theme as we run too much risk of having two parallel themes with the same name. Right now, the development on the original version seems 'frozen' so we can (relatively) easily tell that its the 'original' or the 'Danny' version (with the obvious benefits of Danny's continued support and development work). That said, I'm more than happy to try and do what i can if there are specific bug fixes needed to Julian's original for anyone, like me, who does not yet want to upgrade to Danny's version.
Likewise with Essential - as far as I can see its a relatively stable theme in its current form. I have no plans to develop it further, but I'm happy to try to provide ongoing bug fixes to the best of my ability within the community.