Nothing stays the same. Especially in the cyberverse. Not only does WordPress update the blogging platform, but authors of the various themes make improvements changes that they publish to the WP site, which sends out little nags to those bloggers using those themes. So I got a couple of updates to this theme. Now all the navigation is in one place, on the sidebar. Click on a tab and a dropdown menu opens, where you can click on the page title, tag, or category or whatever, to take you where you want to go. Text links now show up as orange, making them easier to see (unless you’re colorblind — then I don’t know what to tell you).
There is a new tab on the top navigation bar to link back to the home page. I had to add this because whatever functionality used to tie my logo to the home page went away. You can’t just click on the picture of the dog to go back to the home page. Maybe that will be fixed in the next update. I know it’s possible to add some code to a file to make it work in spite of the update, but these things are a lot more complex than the files I learned to work with way back at the turn of the century when I was learning HTML. I’m such a dinosaur.
I’ve learned to not bother with updating the themes if I have things the way I want them. Back when I was using it, an updated version of Ahimsa was completely messed up by comparison to the old one and I finally had to dump it for something else. (That was actually two theme changes ago.)
I’m not sure why a theme designer would break something like a home page link. That kind of violates the principle of least surprise.
With regard to theme complexity, I’ve made my own theme from scratch before. Once (Quinn’s Big City). If I really need to do it again, I will. It’s possible, especially if guided by a decent tutorial (I was), but it’s not something I recommend just anyone try because there are quite a few non-obvious gotchas.