Why is it so hard?

[Steem]

I really don't understand why you just can't "remove" the blank theme and make a theme of your own? I want to be able to create my own theme without extending from blank (or luma). How is it that this is not possible? The less files are unnecessarily complex and you are forced to overwrite almost every little thing. I now have a design from our designer for a new client and I as yet have no idea whatsoever how to make this happen.

• Why are there so many variables?
• Why is everything nested so utterly deep?
• Why does every little thing have to have is own styles?
• Why is there no way to just write your own css (be it plain, less or sass)?

I am just speechless at how hard Magento 2 has become for front end developers.

[nlscrw80]

I feel your pain.

I'm building a site and have extended Blank and removed all default styling.  Then it's a case of going through every file piece by piece and replacing necessary components.

The reason I'm sticking with it is simply due to the backend functionality of managing customers, orders, etc.

But if you don't need these features, I would look elsewhere.

And by the way, just wait until you start customizing the checkout process.  The main pages are the easy part.

[Steem]

Thanks. I finally found out how to remove the default styles, although I'm afraid I will run into several problems later on. I've added a new path for the css and added my own gulp file to render sass which works MUCH faster than the installed way. 16 miliseconds versus 7.6 seconds. Still I have to wait 3/4 seconds for the page to reload... 

[wysewun]

yeah, I agree, it is quite a bit to come to grips with. I am new to the platform but it makes sense once you consider that extensions can merge much easier into the layouts because of the nesting. 

I think this article sheds some light on the nesting.

https://alankent.me/2015/04/26/declarative-vs-imperative-layout-files/

Plus, if you are using sass, then there is a sass blank theme available here with gulp support

https://github.com/SnowdogApps/magento2-frontools

hope that helps