Personally, anything that drives standards up and raises the bar is a good move in my eyes. The same way Apple wrecked my tolerance of low pixel density screens and pushed me higher, I want to be pushed with regard to design also. As a community we are all playing with legos and there is not too much originality around.

Woothemes set this off when they quit the lifetime updates. I think it is great I do not see how people can reasonably expect to get everything, forever citing GPL compliance. WordPress does not have the same monetization model that theme shops do. Design is worth money and beauty is worth even more.

These have a fallback if your renewal lapses, so if it is not worth it to you then you lose the look. This introduces people to high end typography options. Typography that can cross lines from web to print and go right into Illustrator or Photoshop.

Branding agencies have teams of creatives and make hundreds of revisions when drafting graphic standards manuals and specifying logo usage rules.

here is one example Google has: https://sites.google.com/site/uwugc2012/event-resources-and-calendar/event-planning-print-materials and those four rules are just a small snapshot of what goes into good design. Rules, Margins, Appropriate Spacing the stuff that makes you stare at a design while it seduces you visually.

In summary, my observation is that, we are going back to print design. Yup I just said it, it's been happening. With tablets in such high use we are back to holding paper and interacting with the pages like a book. We will soon forget what a book is but we will still increasingly use tablets. This will drive us back to what works on paper. I cant help but feel like I am reading a newspaper, folding it in half and tucking it under may arm as I leave the house only doing that with my iPad.

Until the tablet design gets defined we will move further and further back to print design. And gorgeous typography will set people apart.

I love it and I would pay for it. #AddictedToDesign