In reply to Michael.

Michael,

The only reason this was pushed live was because the theme had already been reviewed by a key-reviewer, the issues had been fixed, and I wanted them to be able to immediately submit their child themes for it for review.

I made the decision to make the theme live. Me. Not GoDaddy. They didn't ask, and I didn't confirm it with them either. So, take your conspiracy theories back home. :)

My question to you is this: What would be the point of leaving the theme in the queue for a few extra months, when it's already been reviewed and fixed and is ready to go? I mean, I do understand why some would see this as unfair, but waiting extra time for something that is already ready to go right now makes no sense to me.

The point of the review queue is not to be an arbitrary place to wait. It's to have your themes reviewed by people who can help fix up the problems with them before they're released, instead of waiting until afterwards. If the theme is ready to go, make the damn thing live. I don't really understand why there's such a wait to begin with. Why are themes waiting 2 months for key-reviewers to hit the go-live button? Have the themes not been reviewed enough or something?

Frankly, the queue is flat out broken. Anything longer than a month is ridiculous. A theme review should take about an hour, and then it should be live within an hour after that if it has no problems. There is a fundamental bottleneck here, and that is simply that the theme team is looking for perfection. It's too high a goal, IMO. The standards are too strict.

Admittedly, the quality of submissions is quite low. Theme authors submit now when the theme doesn't even work properly, and has glaring and obvious issues with it. Mainly because the queue is so long. That's dumb. Themes should not be submitted until they're ready.

Theme authors should review their own themes themselves, and find their own problems. Every submitted theme *should* pass first try. Next to none actually do. That's the problem we really need to solve here.

And no, I don't think "automation" is the ultimate solution to this problem. Nor do I think it will fix anything.