Considering we have Customizer, Gutenberg, easy ways to add CSS, and 10,000s of plugins I'm surprised to still be seeing so many templates. I guess old habits die hard. Or is it the desire for instant designs that work right out of the box? Personally, the theme clutter makes it much harder to pick a starting theme. So many themes that are essentially the same.

I hope Featured Themes provides us with a set of themes that provide a good foundation to build on. Themes that give us a head start on designing a website: good page structure and classes that provide good support for whatever I need to do with CSS.

But most of all I would like to see more attention to WP core. I should not have to add 50 plugins to get basic webmaster functionality. Lots of little functions that make a big difference in managing a website.