Part of me is amazed this conversation has to take place because I see multiple marketplaces thriving which are focused on complex themes and plugins and all of them provide changelogs for both themes and plugins.

The other part of me knows that the only people who seem to still believe users of WordPress aren't smart enough to know or have the desire to have anything other than pre-configured software to make a website easily are the developers of WordPress and their teams. And therefore, they need to be educated as to what the current trends are.

I don't know about most of the people here, but I look through a lot of plugins regularly and based on the usage of those plugins there are many, many people downloading plugins with complex settings areas. Of course, the arrangement isn't the same for themes so there isn't the same information available for them. But seeing the market place platforms selling loads of themes, I would venture to say the trend is the same for themes as well.

I know a lot of "developers" who started developing because they weren't satisfied with the little bit of control and flexibility of WordPress for their own projects. That goes for themes as well as plugins. With over 37,000 plugins along side of a lot of themes (the number isn't readily available on WordPress due to the different structure of the themes area) changelogs are vitally important.

Maybe some day the WordPress team will accept the fact that their beliefs about users needs to change quite a bit. We aren't the same group they started out with. We want to know and we need to know what is being changed in themes to help us know what potential issues we might face when there is an update without having to run comparisons through diffmerg to find out. Not all updates are equal. Changelogs are vitally important for many reasons.

IMHO, WordPress repository for themes is one of the weakest links in the project. Themes hosted on WordPress.org need to be handled the same way plugins are handled.

I find the comments coming from WP team members to be both irritating and arrogant. Listen to the users for a change.. log.. You aren't as unique as you used to be.