Is Weaver the future of wordpress themes.?

Hi I’ve just discovered the Weaver theme and was wondering why it doesn’t appear in the wordpress themes showcase even though it uses the TwentyTen theme as one of its many templates?
I understood that the recommended method for customizing a wordpress theme was to create a child theme, and add any code to the child themes style.css and functions.php. Now the weaver theme with its weaver admin pages seems to makes all that unnecessary – am I correct?. Is this the future of wordpress themes?

David