In reply to Shapeshifter 3.

Just to make note on your comment at the end there about giving the costumer what they want. Are you certain that this is what the majority of consumers want, or is it what you want? Undoubtedly a certain amount of people would want this but I feel it is far from the majority.

I for one (as a user of WP and a developer) certainly do not want WordPress theming to adopt a single theme builder as it would likely foster a very same-y design trend towards everything looking and working exactly the same... The opposite of what I expect people do want which would be creativity and originality.

A theme builder that replaced default themes would be much more stifling than anything else.

By all means roll your own theme builder and use it on your sites/release it as a plugin/contribute it to core/whatever but I recon you'd be targeting a small subset of users that had interest - not the wider community as a whole.