I typically work on larger custom projects, but have found I have a lot of requests for projects at a lower price-point. I think I can serve this audience by creating a core Drupal installation profile, supplementing it with features, and installing one of a dozen or so custom themes I'll make.
I'd like this process to be as plug-and-play as possible. Right now I have an installation profile so all I need to do is 'git clone' the repo for that and then 'drush make' and 'drush install' to get up an running really quickly. This profile does some really basic things (sets admin theme, sets a development theme, installs an 'image gallery' feature which includes a content type and a taxonomy, etc).
So far I'm stumped on how I should develop things like layout (panels, display suite, theme templates?) and default content (devel generate?) during installation. Should I develop a base theme (I use a custom inuitCSS framework) and write sub-themes for it?
Has anyone else put anything else similar together? Do you have suggestions?
This has become a pretty complex endeavor and I'm wondering if it would be better to just build a site for each theme, zip it up and export the database.