Great points about quality and standards.

Still, the average person buying a theme looks at just a few things: price, the feature list, and maybe they'll read some ratings. The end. :) They have no way to tell inner quality, so they will succumb to the utopian sales language. A hardcore geek may be able to deduce more than the newbie, but unless they get their hands on the code, they will also be in the dark, too, as to quality.

People mostly respond to visuals, so if the theme is cute, it will sell, unless maybe it has horrendous ratings and no support.

Even if the Themeforest oh-so-perfect and wonderful theme doesn't do what the client wants and they have to hire me to fix or modify it (a common occurrence), the sale has still been made. So Themeforest wins anyway.

I will say that the TF themes I see lately do seem to be better quality than before. And TF does have a big list of things they want you to have before your theme passes muster to be in there. But even the nicely coded ones are so gigantic that they're hard to work on. (Hello Avada, One, etc.) Clients may be surprised to hear that it takes more hours to fix/modify their "perfect" theme than something leaner and meaner, whether it's Genesis or something else.

Dave