Mike, great position to take. It seems like a lot of the value to the Ollie theme was the onboarding, and no doubt that took a lot of time to come up with conceptually and logically. I’m sure your vision was a pivotal utility for rapidly building block based themes, and that is good.

If this same onboarding could be released and is theme agnostic, that could be a big value to the community, especially with onboarding new users. Then from the product side you could increase the styles and patterns available to build out a what would be previously considered a “child theme” – to core, with revenue opportunity. The main discrepancy here is including features in a theme vs. a theme that suggests installing a plugin for setup.

I can’t speak for Matt, but it seems like his general stance is that themes should not incorporate items that could be better suited as a standalone plugin – used across multiple sites – and that may be the general basis for the pushback for the theme review.

Most importantly you’ve handled this like a gentleman and a businessman and that is for sure important… when we’re all in this together. Hopefully Ollie makes it into the theme directory very soon.

Cheers/Seth