Except you don't drop the entire theme code into your project, just the pieces you want to overwrite. I have to believe here that the idea was to make themes ex

Except you don't drop the entire theme code into your project, just the pieces you want to overwrite. I have to believe here that the idea was to make themes extendable, not customizable (in the way previous Jekyll themes operated). This feels very similar to the concept of a child theme in WordPress, which simply extends the parent theme. Since we're just extending the parent theme and not editing those files, sure, put them in a gem and let me leave them out of my repository. Now you're only tracking the delta of your changes, not the whole theme. When done correctly, this should also let you more easily swap out the parent theme to something different while maintaining your changes with minimal effort. Again, I haven't played with this yet, but the more I think about it the more it makes sense and I'm kind of looking forward to porting a few of the sites I manage.