Alpha / Omega code review & major performance enhancement - Needs reviews!

During the past couple of days I (once again) rewrote the majority of the code in Omega. Note: The API itself still offers the same functions / function names even though a few of them have been marked as "@deprecated". Your sub-themes should not be affected and they will still work, although the performance should be notably better. On my local machine where a clean and fresh Drupal installation with Bartik as default theme takes 340ms to load (average) Omega scored with an average of 348ms which is, I believe, a great achievement! Before we had about 550ms so ... speaking in numbers here ... we just got 200ms or a trillion percent faster .... \o/

Alpha now provides a class named "alpha_theme_container" (this can be extended by your subtheme although it provides a lot of hooks and therefore should not require any extensions under normal circumstances). This class basically is a .. well .. container for your theme with all the settings, regions, zones, advanced configuration, etc. ... This container gets cached (almost entirely) and also implements the Delta module to build Delta-specific cache objects!

DOWNLOAD LINK:

I am not pushing this to the d.o repository until it has been thoroughly tested.
Repository: https://github.com/ThemeGeeks/Omega
Direct Download: https://github.com/ThemeGeeks/Omega/tarball/7.x-3.x

NOTE:

You WILL! get an error message after overwriting your current "omega" folder - This is OKAY!! because it is caused by the fact that the new Omega / Alpha combination has changed some hooks in its template.php. This error message is GONE! after clearing your cache.

ADDITIONAL NOTE:

The theme settings have changed in ONE single aspect. You need to re-configure your equal height feature configuration... Just that, nothing else.

And this is why: "alpha_region_REGION_equal_height" is now "alpha_region_REGION_equal_height_container" and there is a new "... equal_height_element" setting. This change was necesary to prepare Omega for the Omega UI module and its layout manager. I basically had to do this in order to make this feature more generic. This is needed to provide maximum flexibility once Omega UI is ready!

NOTE (for advanced sub-themes):

If your sub-theme has some kick-ass custom preprocess code that uses the Alpha API and its _alter hooks there might be SLIGHT!! changes to that but in 99% of the cases it will work out of the box (I would assume that no sub-theme does any of that so far).