Coming from Raincity Studios, I formed a strong bond with the Basic theme. It was there that I learned how to create my first themes with Basic so naturally I was very protective of it when I started here at Fuse. To me, Basic could do no wrong and for the most part that is still true. Fuse was very pro Zen so I knew I had a bit of an uphill battle to get them on board with Basic. After doing a couple projects with Zen and a couple with Basic I began to warm up to Zen (not that I was about to admit that, I thrive on a bit of healthy conflict).
Basic like Zen has it's own shortcomings so we began to think about what we liked about each of the themes.
Cutting the fat.
I, being a fan of simplicity, love the bare bones feel of Basic. Nothing puts me in a foul mood faster than seeing a folder full of CSS files that aren't even loaded. Zen for one has a lot of that which I just don't feel is necessary for the average seasoned themer. And to be honest it looks quite ugly when you kick open Firebug and find that a style has been overridden 6-8 times before settling on the last one called.
Organization.
Call me anal but I like to have a place for everything and Zen out of the box just wasn't doing it for me. I should never have to create folders and move files around before I even open a file to start theming. Basic was a big win in this department with folders for CSS and templates to tidy things up a bit.
Sub-themes.
There was a bit of a debate on the value of sub-theming. I personally hack base themes up so much over the course of creating a theme that there is not much point because everything has either been changed or overwritten by the end. This one is kind of on a case by case basis for me and so far I haven't needed it. I also hesitate to make this a pro or con for either in the Basic vs. Zen comparison since you could sub-theme Basic if you really wanted to. Zen has just taken the step to set it up that way from the start.
Those nice little extras.
Zen has some nice little extras that are absent from Basic for the main reason that they aren't essential. The main one that we like is the built in breadcrumb control which is a nice little feature to have when you want to do something simple like switch up the separator or append the node title to the end.
Numbers.
Another common point that came up was usage statistics. Zen is currently sitting at 31k + users where basic has 1500+ users. The argument was made that using Zen was a selling point to clients because if they wished to go elsewhere down the road any Drupal shop could easily pick up where we left off. After all is said and done though, a theme is just a theme and any competent Drupal shop should be able to work with the theme you created and if they can't then either you are a poor themer or you need to find another line of work like building Wordpress sites.
So after the somewhat heated debate we decided to go a different direction altogether. Enter Fuse Basic, the best of both worlds and a couple sprinkles on top. Fuse Basic is Basic at it's core with some tweaks to the layout CSS, folder structure and admin settings.
Features:
Top-down load order simplified.
Improved SEO through a content first page load method with simplified CSS so it's easy to tweak layout with only a few lines of code.
More classes than you can shake a stick at.
Unique classes on the body, navigation, block, nodes, comments and more.
Everything in its right place.
Improved folder structure to organized your scripts, templates, CSS and images.
More control over your site.
Admin settings to control Block Edit Links, Tabs, Breadcrumbs, Theme Registry and our new feature #Grid.
#Grid for a pixel perfect layout.
Press G to toggle our #Grid tool to display a 975px grid, perfect for achieving that perfect layout.
A little more room to play with.
We've adapted the layout to match a 975px Grid, which is what we like to use in our designs here at Fuse.
Overall we might have put a bit of the bulk back into Basic but its perfect for our process and maybe yours too. If you haven't checked out Basic you should try that too because it's built by a couple of guys that rock and without them Fuse Basic wouldn't exist or at least be as good. If you've used Basic, Fuse Basic or both tell us why we suck or rock so we can make it even better.