@hakre -

Yes, I agree that you can sell theme without support, but I am talking about the most used practice today and practice of the biggest theme developers, because that proved to be the best solution in the GPL theme environment we have right now.

Also, I agree that educating people about GPL and the ways they can get the theme (or plugin for that matter) that is not full with malicious code is the best solution, but unfortunately so far, WP.org is still not doing good job, and that website should be the main starting point in educating users. After all these years since the GPL themes debate started, there is still no real and valid judgment on the subject, and WP.org doesn't provide anything on the subject that will be helpful IMHO.

But, this is not the first thing where WP.org failed, and it's about time that this website changes and be more informative and helpful for new or unexperienced users. I had several clients (new to WP, but with a lot of experience in the field of CMS and publishing) that had trouble finding anything useful there, and that tells a lot.

In any case, if WP.org allows support for themes not in repository, there is not much anyone can do about that, and premium developers that will be potentially affected by that will have no way to influence that.