I’m in the camp of people who believes themes should work out of the box.

You lost me here.

Most require setup and reading the manual. Default themes don’t even work that well without reading instructions.

This review is a bit weird. A better approach would have been to perhaps expand on what you believe makes a theme good “out of the box” especially given how rapidly development expectations around them are changing.

Devs reviewing products for real users sometimes misses the mark. This was one of those times.