In reply to holmegm.

"I don’t know where the “should” comes from in all this …

“Should people pay more for what I do? A survey of myself and others like me says ‘yes’!” Uh, OK :)"

That rather sums up my thoughts on this (as well as justifying Gary's reference to Betteridge's law, above).

I'm also somewhat disturbed by the increasingly condescending tone directed towards WordPress users who are not the among the supposed cognoscenti who know how WordPress works or what its coding standards are (and who therefore are apparently too ignorant to realize just how much "we" are all worth).

I'd pay (and have paid) $100s for a good plugin. But for a theme? No chance! The whole notion of what a theme is, which apparently underlies this discussion, is completely misguided.

Most theme developers (including the ones who are paraded as "clean coders") love to tell us about their "excellent typography," for example. Well, I don't care. I have changed the font on every theme I've ever used. And for good reason.

Most of these celebrated coders' typography would actually fail accessibility standards in many nations, which is somewhat ironic when other posts here at the Tavern seem concerned to promote accessibility.

I could make similar points about almost every other element of very many themes. So, unless my needs are simple, in which case there are plenty of excellent themes on wordpress.org, I am going to be changing a ton of stuff.

So why would I pay $100+ for a theme? It's there just to provide the skeleton. I get not just the functionality, but also much of the design, from plugins. A good one of those really is worth $100s.