Drupal Template override issues

It's standard practice to override your drupal templates by using suggestions from the theme developer module - http://drupal.org/project/devel_themer.

While doing some testing with overriding the garland theme I found after much head pounding that you have to bring over the base template if you want to use a more specific template.

For instance:

I want to use a separate template for the home page: page-front.tpl.php.

The standard way to do this is to create the directory garland under sites/all/themes and place the file page-front.tpl.php there.
No matter what I tried I could not get drupal to pick this file up.

It seems that there is an issue - with Drupal 6 at least - you need the base template file in the sites/all/themes/[template] directory.

In order for Drupal to pick up the page specific templates you need the page.tpl.php file in the same directory.

So if you want to use page-front.tpl.php you also need page.tpl.php in the same directory or Drupal won't find your template.

EDIT:

After reading Front End Drupal Designing, Theming, Scripting this makes sense now.