You can do a lot with a stock 2.0 theme, but sometimes what works for the most people won't be enough for you.

Not quite all of your eggs in one basket, but a drop-in section with most of what you need can be incredibly handy.

It isn't showy, but it wears a lot of hats.

Iterating over metaobjects in theme files can be enough in most situations, but there are some things that require large blocks of unwieldy liquid code to accomplish what could be short and cleaner in javascript.

Templating layers are a necessity, but they should do as little as possible.

Having to maintain two separate but identical layouts? NO THANKS.