Wanted to share this with you guys; this is what the back-end theme template coding looks like in Gaia: Salerno (version 2). So creating a theme will be dealing in basically straight up HTML, you will be accessing and using PHP variables and expressions, but they'll be simplified. Even I'm finding some awesomeness in the simplification.
Salerno doesn't have a release timeline, as of now, since I need to rewrite all the templates in both the front-end and admin-panel versions of Eros, it may take a few weeks before I'm ready to move on from the template system.