In reply to Justin Tadlock.

What incentive does anyone have to participate in being dictated to?

While I truly respect the technical knowledge of TRT, I fail to see why TRT even has the authority to make non-technical decisions for an entire community.

I've been plenty vocal in fact I've been in this community long before you were promoted to admin on .org. Not a single thing that I've warned the TRT about has been taken seriously. I tried to warn TRT about the traction I was receieving from being featured, and how powerful it was; yet the TRT moved forward with the review contest anyway flooding the repo with all the poorly coded themes you're all dealing with now. I tried to prevent millions of websites from being broken by allowing me to release a follow up to Responsive in its own repo, but even that wasn't allowed. I'm one of the few authors who isn't afraid to voice my opinion and the more I did, the more TRT came after my themes and my theme shop. Other authors don't want to be targeted like I was so they don't speak up out of fear.

I've been pulled aside in private by dozens of theme authors at WordCamps, on Skype, Slack, and email thanking me for standing up for theme authors but it's to no avail because TRT does whatever it wants reguardless of the feedback of even its largest theme author.

Admittingly I didn't make the transition to Slack because after I attended WCSF'14 and was asked not to participate in the community summit I decided it was in my best interest at that point to sell my theme shop rather then participate in this "community" any further.

I suspected TRT was going to force the customizer on everyone and destroy theme authors ability to communicate with users. TRT had already prevented me from maintaining my branding with my theme names, remove all my theme notices, and cripple much of the functionality of my themes over the years despite the fact my themes were more popular than even Automattics. The writing was on the wall.

It doesn't really surprise me that a random vote would occur like this forcing such a major decision without any consideration for the greater community.

When you ignore your top theme authors, continually make decisions to limit their capabilities, fail to come to reasonable solutions, and force unpopular features and decisions on them what incentive do they have to participate?

Luckily I'm no longer impacted by TRT rules as I've essentially been forced out of the community because of decisions like this.

Lastly I'm only replying here because I think it's important for TRT and other members of the WordPress community to understand that these kind of decisions destroy businesses and people's livelihoods unless handled and considered properly. WordPress is supposed to be open source but apparently that's no longer true if you wish to release a theme on WordPress.org. Once more developers are exposed to the practices of TRT they will leave.