In reply to mark k..

I think Mark is on the right track here. Yes, as many have said in the past, building "Plugin Features" as part of "Theme Design" can look attractive to the young theme shopper, and then turn into a migration nightmare when those features aren't supported by your next theme. As you say, it's killing the ecosystem and the users are the losers. We've already got PLENTY of proprietary platforms where that's true, it's a shame to have an Open Source beacon like WordPress fall to this as well. The whole point of CSS and Themes is that we've created power in separating the Content and Form which were in a single Web1.0 doc. If we don't honor that, where are we?

However, as Mark suggests, I think we're not going to get theme designers to stop making problematic themes. And I think we can educate some site developers, but educating every possible user isn't realistic either. Given that I don't see how we can ever educate all the users nor motivate all the designers, like it or not, that means that it kind of falls to Core to solve the problem that others have created. There could be further plugins or pay services to get users out of the mess they didn't know they were getting into, but it'd be great if WordPress itself had a means of addressing unintended messes.