The Rev's template design blog post

As some of you may know, I am trying to get my head around the template system of Dolphin to try and give something back to this community. I am coming across numerous stumbling blocks that I have yet to find solutions to, so I shall post them in this very post to keep them all in a continuous flow kind of thing, keeps the blog tidier too I guess. . Something I am currently stuck on is how to get the view topic area background in the Orca post areas to change from the white background colour. I have tried everything I could think of so far to no avail, I even put a black block color into the author_bg.gif. This has placed a black background behind the post author avatar as it should, the weird part is that the author_bg.gif is present in the post view area, if I click view background image the author_bg.gif is there, but oddly there exists a white background colour on top of the author_bg.gif. Does anyone know how to resolve that? . I think I've figured out why the graphic border is not present on every page now, because the tmpl_uni calls the base _header and the base _footer I figured I had to put the border code there, I'm going to put it in the tmpl_uni files later today to see if it works in there. . Has anyone merged the tmpl_uni and the base templates to put an end to the new template design being dependant on the base template. I've carefully looked at all the files in both templates and oh my, there is absolutely no sense to how they have been configured, having templates dependant on the base template is a really heavy duty pain in the butt. Trouble is, where on Earth do I start with merging the two templates to make a unified stand alone template. Can we simply copy and paste all of the information missing in the tmpl_uni .css files from the base .css files and remove all of the calls in the tmpl_uni .css files to the base .css files, or would it work better if I simply copied the base .css folder into the tmpl_uni css folder and changed the calls from the base .css to the new base .css folder within the tmpl_uni css folder?