My IP address is 178.138.96.45
Making a theme backwards compatible is not a bulletproof procedure. A change as small as moving scripts to the footer could break lots of websites even if they made customizations with a child theme. Every small change could potentially break a workflow and there’s no way around this. That’s never good news but then again clinging to legacy implementations for the sake of backwards compatibility also isn’t a good idea.
How does this theme appeal to you now? I did it back in 2009 and it was one of the most popular themes of its time. Eventually we had to discontinue it because it wasn’t keeping up with current technology and design trends. Pinboard’s design already looks dated and that’s how it will feel like in 2 years if we allow the same mistakes to happen.
There’s no way to customize a template without testing it in a live environment. The way I do it when I need to customize a website before moving it to production is clone the website in a local environment (all you need to do is copy the files and database and make some changes) and make all customizations and tests in the local server and when it’s stable enough I upload the theme to the live server.
Back in June when I redesigned this website I cloned the existing content on my local server and tested the redesign on existing posts and forum topics. It’s an overhead but making something functional requires work and attention to detail. Development of Enlightenment Theme took 4 years of research, coding, scrapping and testing and the theme is far from perfect. There are no shortcuts.