This is a good, simple theme, at least in PHP terms, and is certainly well commented.
However, I think it heavily falls down in it's ambition of being a good general-purpose starter theme by making some strongly opinionated decisions out of the box. There's far too much grid code in the CSS. It also bizarrely bundles fittext and fitvid, two excellent libraries which have nothing to do with Wordpress.
I would also argue that anyone building a Wordpress theme should be looking things up on the Codex. You don't have to "learn" the Codex any more than you have to "learn" the dictionary. It's there as a reliable and canonical reference, and telling people not to use it will result in bad code and confused developers.
I never sat down to "learn" the WP Codex either. I began with the most simple and bare-bones WP template there was, and slowly built up on my foundation as I needed the features.
A quick Google search usually brings up the most relevant Codex page and while their code examples aren't always the best, the web usually provides enough user-written tutorials to get my the solution I need.
However, I think it heavily falls down in it's ambition of being a good general-purpose starter theme by making some strongly opinionated decisions out of the box. There's far too much grid code in the CSS. It also bizarrely bundles fittext and fitvid, two excellent libraries which have nothing to do with Wordpress.
I would also argue that anyone building a Wordpress theme should be looking things up on the Codex. You don't have to "learn" the Codex any more than you have to "learn" the dictionary. It's there as a reliable and canonical reference, and telling people not to use it will result in bad code and confused developers.