The Separation of Genesis & Child Themes

[monkeycoder]

Hi.

I haven't yet purchased... but have just spent the better part of an hour reading as much info as I could find on your site.

The aspect of your products that intrigues me most is the separation of the design from the framework... many times in the past I've purchased a theme, customized it not by changing some simplistic admin area controls for "skins" or what have you... but rather by editing the raw code within the PHP and CSS files... but these actions have more or less prevented me from ever upgrading those themes when updates became available as this would require all that customization to be re-done.

So the way I'm understanding what you call a "Child Theme"... is that that would be the place where I could completely alter raw code... with no fear of abandoning future Wordpress functionality or added functionality from Genesis framework upgrades... would that be an accurate assessment?

And how about upgrades to Child Themes... does Studiopress post change logs to make it easy for designers who have altered the base code to know which lines of code have changed in any upgrade?

As your prices are a little higher than I'm used to paying for premium Wordpress frameworks, I'm just trying to make sure the situation I describe above will be what I'm getting.

Thanks in advance for your reply.