I agree with you to a point Chris, but it wasn’t that easy in Moodle 2.0 as the main structure was not finalised for a few weeks at the start. My first shot at making a theme for Moodle 2.0 was called ‘Flower Power‘. It was pretty basic but looked nice, but not good enough as I was only a learner. I knew little about PHP, but as things progressed and new elements added, I started to get the hang of Theme design. I eventually made Afterburner for New School Learning which was added in a newer version of Moodle which was a year or two later.
Cheers
Mary