It's really interesting that Bootstrap is becoming another layer of abstraction to be found in a lot of projects, like jQuery before it.
So far I'm pretty sure that's not a bad thing.
So far I'm pretty sure that's not a bad thing.
The major problem you see with this useage is that people start a project with Bootstrap 1.2, and 2.0 comes out, there's no chance in hell that they upgrade. Partly this is ignorance, partly this is because there is still no good package manager for the open web - and that's not for lack of coding chops, but because, IMHO, we're still not really sure what "package manager for the open web" should mean.
A page as an execution environment is both incredibly rich and incredibly risky. As much as the web itself is a wild-west of innovation, so is the page environment. We can pull scripts, images, css, data and even DOM from around the world. And for the most part we still do it by adding a line in the page and, if we want a local copy, a wget. The only reason resources don't step on each other is luck and convention - usually it's mostly luck (although the "single global object per library" convention for javascript seems to work really really well.)
It's time that coders and designers both start to think of CSS as reactive functions that map from DOM to pixels and are invoked with class names and ids (this is a lot different than their intended uses, but let's face it, semantic markup doesn't really meet any real human need). Perhaps, echoing the success of the javascript convention, we should adopt a convention that lets css libraries to exist within a single, top-level selector.
Projects like Meteor, Derby and AngularJS are a good push in the right direction, but there's still a long ways to go I think.
Do they all look different to people who aren't designers/devs? I don't know, but as a developer, when I see a new project I have become oblivious to the design and find it challenging sometimes to see past the "just another app built with twitter bootstrap" to find the application's true value
I think a lot of early stage startups are staffing less graphic art/design via their dependence on Bootstrap.
All in all, it is a sweet front end visual framework!