Why the hate? Some of us have been around for a long time and seen the same UI mistakes repeated over and over. This approach to animation seems to take something that wasn't broken in the first place, and replace it with something worse. On most sites today, I put my cursor over a button and it lights up or fades on hover. If I click it or touch it, it depresses. That's plenty of affordance. I don't see how replacing a simple effect with a dramatic, second long button flash improves matters. And if the material evangelists had their way, this is how every website would work.
Of course you can see this becoming popular in the months ahead. There's always some stupid trend that makes headlines for a few years, then fades away. Remember when gradients and reflections were in? Remember when everyone had to have a splash page? The best design ignores trends and builds upon all we've learned about user behavior since the first command line. There's always room for improvement and experimentation. But as long as we're locked in the fad-of-the-year hype cycle, we turn the whole web into a poorly designed experiment, with users as our unwilling test subjects.
The kind of effect you're talking about goes against material design... actually a lot of what is in the theme breaks the guidelines and their intent.
I'm disappointed that this project didn't start as a fork of bootstrap, then the changes applied. It really seems like a designer trying to make a money play off of other's efforts. I can't be certain that is the case, but that is definitely the feel I get, and even then it seems to be only halfway there with the shadows applied to elements they don't belong in.
I've tried to follow the style of the Bootswatch, in this way it's very easy for users to inject this theme in any Bootstrap website. I'm thinking about writing a separated project sharing the CSS and basing it on some grid system without Bootstrap dependencies, keeping the compatibility with Bootstrap.
Of course you can see this becoming popular in the months ahead. There's always some stupid trend that makes headlines for a few years, then fades away. Remember when gradients and reflections were in? Remember when everyone had to have a splash page? The best design ignores trends and builds upon all we've learned about user behavior since the first command line. There's always room for improvement and experimentation. But as long as we're locked in the fad-of-the-year hype cycle, we turn the whole web into a poorly designed experiment, with users as our unwilling test subjects.