there was a lot of talk about clean html vs predefined classes (aka additive vs subtractive). however, i felt the talk sometimes lost focus on the newbies in audience.

my two cents...

in general, if you're still learning how drupal works, its much easier to take stuff away (and see what breaks), than to try figure out what exactly is missing or how to build it the drupal way.

for newbies to drupal, zen's main advantage over virtually any other theme is that it strives to both teach and remain lightweight...

• it shows (and has introduced to core) many best practices
• it comes with tons of pretty class definitions, that allow you to make your designs work without needing to know an ounce of PHP
• it has LOTS of documentation.
• plus it uses conditional includes, which actually keeps it smaller in size than many (if not most) other themes in terms of overhead.

that's not to suggest an additive approach isn't ultimately better. a clean readable output is like fine art to a web developer. but I feel this part of the conversation can hurt newbies if you introduce this standard without identifying the obstacles. when you first learn drupal, most of your time is spent just trying to get drupal to look like your design. it's difficult enough to deal with the breadth of functionality that drupal brings to project - let alone to understand the depth of overrides that can, and often exist as you begin adding more and more contributed modules.

zen is by far a better starting point and why five minutes of the podcast focused so much disdain upon garland.