Using Drush

Yeah... Drush on shared hosting is a PITA. However, if you develop and work directly on your server you are doing it wrong (TM). Creating and working on a theme is a development task. It's not sitebuilding. If you do that on your server directly there is not much we can do to make it easier for you. It's simply not a supported workflow. You also won't be able to use most of the tools that we encourage you to use when working in the front-end. Thus, what you want is a local development environment where you can run Drush, etc. easily without any problems and then, when you are finished, put your stuff on the server. This is how it should be done. In any case. This is not about Omega and it's Drush integration, it's about your workflow in general. These things are essential if you want to be productive in this area - Regardless of what theme you are working with.

However, even if you do it manually and without Drush, setting up a subtheme is hardly "crazy". It's basically just copy&paste of the starterkit folder and renaming the files that have {{ }} placeholders in their name and doing the same IN some of the files. Done.

I am sorry that you think that we are trying to get rid of normal users because that is clearly not the case. We are trying to help our users to employ the right tools, techniques and strategies for their front-end work. That is our primary goal really.

I myself work on three environments periodically: A desktop at the office, another desktop at home and a laptop for when I am travelling. Each has a local development stack (LAMP [Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP]) installed as well as my IDE of choice (PHPStorm) and anything else I need to do my work. Development should *always* happen locally - And when I say locally, I don't mean a single development environment you set up and access from various machines. Every machine that you work with should have this - On it's own. You can of course work with Omega 4.x on a shared host directly - Same with Zen, AdaptiveTheme or any other base theme. There is no difference to Omega 4.x between those others in that regard. It's simply not suggested as working on a remote server directly is absolutely not the right thing to do! It never is. Syncing your work between the different environments is something you do with git and drush. Git for syncing and version controlling your code, drush for syncing your site files (images and stuff) and database. This is an essential part of maintaining a proper, professional development workflow and I highly suggest you read up on these topics. I am not saying this because I am trying to sell anything to you but because I am passionate about this topic and am worried about what you explained earlier when you said that you are working directly on your server. Don't do that! It will bite you in the long run and it is anything but aiding your productivity (trust me).

My suggestion to you would be: Set up a proper development stack on one your favorite machine first. Get a proper IDE, install a LAMP stack, install Drush (all locally) and then try setting up Drupal in your new, local development environment. You will soon understand the benefits ;-).

This is not a 4.x documentation issue - This is far more essential than base theme documentation. It's about how you work, fundamentally. Sure, we should and we will reference resources where ppl can learn how to get started with all that - But it would be just as a reference for resources that help you get started with all this the right way.