Half way through customizing a Hugo theme, I suddenly realized that I don't need a theme at all. Hugo can be used themelessly, where you just write templates specifically for your site. Everything was so much easier from there.
That was my experience too. There is/was no formal standard for creating themes, just an empty dir (which they consider a feature). Even if they had one or two "official themes" that would have helped tremendously.
Instead we spent a week researching how popular 3rd party themes did things, and made a hybrid. Then we moved away completely. I really wanted it to work for us and we were so close. Hugo is so fast and is brilliant on a couple of things.... but barely missed.
I can't remember exactly but with what we were doing we were going to be heavily dependant on their Scratchpad, which felt like a hack. It's all just hacks, and they like it. Lack of solid conventions, and they LOVE it.
OK I see, but even though it's themeless you still have to follow the Hugo theming structure (_default, partials, index.html, etc). Mine is the same as that, it's just nested into the themes directory.
It's that theming structure that was a pain to figure out the first time for me
Yeah, that template look-up hierarchy is unavoidable. The benefit of being themeless is mostly organizational: one config file, one asset directory, etc.
