@Benjamin - The fact that you own developer licenses for all of them does, for sure, give your opinion serious weight and I would certainly agree that, for any Web designer with a decent amount of customers, ALL of these developer packages are worth every cent, it is great to be able to offer your customers such a wide array of styles as a starting point.

The question mark I raised over the price that ithemes are charging was more based upon the huge amount of starting Web designers who churn through the lower end of the market, I meant to suggest that ithemes were losing out overall by not pitching their price to appeal to the thousands of designers who give Web design a shot for about a year before moving on to something else - it is very much that sort of industry, I would guess that "temporary" Web designers outnumber serious, long-term designers at least ten to one, and anyone struggling to get started is going to opt for the $200 option rather than the $500.

I didn't know about the unbranded video tutorials, that does sound useful, and I didn't know about the training seminars which also sound good, but it would appear that, for whatever reason, awareness of these good things that ithemes are doing is not very high, and it could be because most people switch off when they see how much their flagship All-Themes package costs. Again, the Builder theme could change that.

I agree that the newer themes are good, although Essence is still my favorite. I disagree that Essence being 2 years old justifies not updating it - I am not arguing that I, as a customer, deserve that, I am saying that they, as a company, are losing an opportunity to keep past customers engaged.

I bought a developer package from Brian Gardner only once, but he has kept giving me a return on that. The return he gets for the continuing value he provides to me is that I recommend him to others and I know for a fact that this has resulted in an ongoing stream of sales. For such an supremely intangible product, that is a pretty good model. If I was to make any criticism of StudioPress, it would be that their management of their affiliate scheme is a bit of a mess, I would not recommend it at all, but no company can get everything right.