In reply to Justin.

* Folks were just choosing their own themes to feature.

So the solution is to allow whoever is picking the themes now to pick themes with close ties to Automattic, Audrey Capital, and the WordPress foundation instead?

Whoever selected this months featured themes clearly had a bias towards the people and companies selected.

Keep in mind WordPress.org is a non-profit organization, and is now recommending commercial products with people and companies that is has direct ties with (several of which are on payroll). I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure we're entering some questionable ethical territory here. Conflict of interest comes to mind.

* The same themes were featured month after month.

CyberChimps was actually told by WordPress.org admins that the only way to be featured was to win the contest every month and select our own theme. This was actively encouraged by the admins for months.

I personally questioned this as well, and I warned the admins that this would lead to trouble, and well it did.

* Theme authors were trying to game the system to get featured.

I'm aware, no one was policing the contest even though it was clear people were cheating (ticket hogging, reviewing only themes from Automattic, etc).

I'm not sure what you guys expected, being featured means your theme is the first thing people see in their WordPress dashboards when a user goes to select their first theme.

Being featured increases downloads by at least 1/3 to whoever is featured and pretty much guarantees them a spot in the top 15 as well for 1-3 months depending on how long they were featured. This makes the top 15 basically just a mirror of the featured themes list and prevents not featured themes from ever reaching the top 15.

Before the theme review contest we regularly had 2-3 themes in the top 15 because actual people decided those were themes they liked, rather then a contest, or a curator selecting featured themes for them.

If you watch what happens next you will see that by the end of next week all the previously featured themes will fall out of the top 15, and the new featured themes will dominate until they're phased out. There is no way for the best themes to rise to the top anymore, the entire system is being "gamed" by the admins now, so we just traded theme authors gaming the system for admins gaming the system.

Meanwhile why the default themes are even allowed ranking in the top 15 is also beyond me.