Thanks for the review, Jeff. I truly appreciate the constructive criticism, too. The main reason I sent this theme to you for review, was specifically for this type of feedback. You have some very good points and I’m sure it’ll be helpful in upcoming updates. That said, the thing about WordPress is there are multiple ways to perform single tasks. In most cases, it all boils down to user preference. As a theme developer, you never know what kind of end-user you're dealing with; Some prefer frameworks with more point-and-click, and drag-n-drop options, while others don't want to be tied to third party code or spend the time learning a whole new set of functions in order to extend their theme (as in a CMS). My aim for Evenflow was to build a theme both the end-user and a novice developer can benefit from.

Personally, I prefer raw control over theme files in order to leverage from the native code base, rather than requiring the theme to pass through a whole new set of functions before the layout is even parsed. For example, why query the database and loop through a series of PHP functions just to specify a category template when all you have to do is duplicate and rename a category-slugname.php file? If the category displays a different markup to begin with, then it usually requires a new file anyway. I know many users are framework fanatics and maybe one day I’ll be, but I’d like to believe some people just want to use WP to build web sites and not just blogs of content. If you’re going to build a modern web site, you need to be prepared to roll up your sleeves from time to time. I won’t go any further comparing a theme against a theme framework because there really is no comparison. I’ve thought about solely developing child themes, because I don’t want to create yet another framework. I’d be interested in seeing how a business model like this would work without stepping on anyone’s toes in the process of redistributing other’s code. Maybe another topic?

You're absolutely correct about the navigation features. This is probably the biggest weakness of WordPress. I'm really excited about 3.0.

To clarify the confusion, the Top menu is the one at the top of the screen. The Main menu is the predominant navbar just below the logo.

Yes, the Exclude Pages plugin is pretty much useless with this theme. That’s pretty much what the Navigation tab does for you. The purpose of displaying the ID’s next to the Page checkbox was really just for quick reference to specify the featured slides. That said, the whole approach of the Slider may need to be rethought for flexibility’s sake. I chose to use Pages for this theme because of the style and intention of the theme. For example, the way I used them in the demo to link to the individual Feature pages. I suppose for a larger site, a “Featured” category approach may be more universally beneficial.

As for the ads and scripts tabs, yes there are many great plugins that do this for you. The purpose of adding this functionality was so the user wouldn’t need to install and maintain plugins, but leverage mainly from Google Adsense and Google Analytics. If there were a plugin for tracking monetization within WordPress, I probably wouldn’t use it anyway. WordPress hammers the database bad enough as it is.
Thanks again for the review. I really enjoy your podcast and look forward to hearing back from your readers.