Making the distinction between premium themes and the degrees of theme beneath them really only lets the less than premium themes get a free ride.
So now we have premium, freemium, non-gpl, gpl, child, parent, free, commercial, *proprietary themes. Hey, at least we don’t have to worry about grand child themes!
My head hurts already from trying to think of the various classifications for a WordPress theme. By the way, proprietary is starred because that’s what Matt calls non-gpl pay for themes. At this point, I would say that themes you pay for is what I think of when I hear the word premium but after seeing Andrew give the lowdown on the top five themes on the repository, I’m beginning to think premium is just a means of describing a theme that is above par and something you don’t ALWAYS have to pay for. As if parent/child themes were not complicated enough, now we have about 50 different classifications for themes. Who’s responsible for this?!
So what do you think about a grading or classification system on the theme repository? What do you think about all of the various terms used to describe a theme?
The only major problem I foresee is that you’d have to have a central authority to ‘rank’ the themes. The problem with classification now is because the theme author can call it anything he thinks he can get away with, and that will sell or spread his theme the best.
Even if you can get a ‘central authority’ to rank themes, unless it’s widely recognized as the theme ranking authority site, it still won’t work.