WordPress themes with lots of files

Usually when I download themes off of wordpress.org (yes, I do that sometimes) it makes me wonder why people stuff dozens of files in their template. Not all of them, there are some themes that the more you look at how the author coded them the more beautiful the lines of code become. The normal scenario, however, goes like this:

You see a theme you like and think it would be a good match for your current project. You download the file to your computer and extract it to a folder on your hard drive. Suddenly – “KABOOM!” It’s like a bomb exploded in your folder with file bits flying around, people screaming and … you get the idea.

For me having more than 10 files in a template (excluding image files that is) makes the theme unbearable. Most of the time if you want to change a tiny little something you have to go through all the files replacing the target piece of code one-by-one. In such situations I usually tend to get lost.

I don’t know about you, but I find it so much easier just to open up a file selected from a list of 5-10, go to the appropriate section of the code and add some conditional statements. I know this may not be the way to go for everybody, but then again I do not think having 30+ files in your template is the way to go.