I contacted support to see if this is doable, but I'd like to find a way to download the standard templates to add / edit them as brand new templates.
Basically use one of the standard templates as a base starting point since for example the "standard: original" template is like almost perfect for our needs and just want to add some more variables to it.
When you set up the local dev following the documentation you only get the bold.html or minimal.html templates.
The standard templates (not the ones we give you in the base quote theme) are built on an older version of the system. We hear you that it'd be useful to start from one of those templates designs. In this phase of the beta that's not possible. That said since you control the code in custom templates it is possible to recreate the design it just would take more effort than cloning.