Wordpress is taking another step on this idea. With child themes, we can develop a base theme only with strucuture styles and then develop as many child themes as we want applying colors and so on. Coincidently I’m doing it ATM, I’m developing a theme that has Semantic XHTML and CSS that structures positions and sizes, and 2 or 3 child themes that apply different colors to it.

Children can be as visually different as webdesigner’s criativity allows, while back strucuture and text formatting is the same, allowing me to have many sites and manage them as if they were only 1. I can use the same plugins with the same configs, and everytime I wanna implement a new feature I add it to base theme, style it, and when it is updated all sites instantly show this new feature with their respective colors without needing to touch children.

The situation would be as bad as you say if for each post we’d need a new custom template, with more styles and stuff.

I just wanted to tell you though, that you are now one of my Web Dev Heroes.