I’m with you on this — I posted the previous topic in this forum on basically the same topic (need to keep main WP theme, but just looking to make the bbpress forums cleaner looking).
All I got was a generic “here’s the bbpress page on modifying your theme” and without being a master PHP/CSS/HTML guru, that theming page is a bit intimidating and confusing.
What would be GREAT is if someone said “Here, do this ”
1) Create a directory off your Theme’s dir called “my-templates”
2) Drop these files in there for an example clean looking bbpress theme
3) You can modify THIS and THAT file in this example to suit your needs.
Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but bbpress, with all of its advancements, HAS to have some drop-in example themes… ?
Lets hope both of us get a simple example we can try out.