I am happy to say that I completed my upgrade to BlogEngine.Net v1.3 without any major problems.  What struck me very annoying was the corners I had painted myself into with my theme.  During the upgrade I realized the many customizations I made to give my blog that personal feel were causing me a lot of extra effort.  I am not completely sure but I can imagine that some of the namespaces and syntaxes will not be exactly the same between versions.  This was highlighted for me when I tried to move the Akismet extension over (which didn't natively work, and still doesn't work on my site yet).0

I was reluctant to simply move my theme as it was, and ultimately ended up reconfiguring a new theme.  This is where the pain really started, as I had to go through the new theme and add/remove/edit all of the sections to be exactly the way I wanted them to be. 

So I started thinking...  Is this issue because BlogEngine.Net uses a site.master page in the theme folder?  Wouldn't it be better to place the structure of the site at the root of the web and then have the themes there to adjust what the look and feel is?  For example, I don't like the calendar view; I think it clutters up the page without adding any real value.  But everytime I wanted to change the theme I would have to go into the site.master file and hide that object.  Wouldn't it be nice if I could switch themes, or even better if the reader could switch themes at their leisure?  Accommodating this feature would require me to customize every theme I wanted to offer to the reader.  Yuck! 

I know theme switching is possible, although not built into BlogEngine.Net yet.  Several sites allow you to switch your theme to suit your taste.  Why not BlogEngine.Net?

So I ask, how can we re-structure the master pages design to better allow for a more simplified upgrade, and provide the reader the ability to switch the theme at their whim?