Everybody wants a theme marketplace on WordPress.org, but nobody wants to run it.

Matt has been critical of the theme review guidelines for years. Yet in all that time he did nothing to change WordPress in a way that could cut down on these guidelines.

WordPress doesn't have a templating layer that would make it trivial to escape data on output.

Even worse a theme can do pretty much anything that a plugin does. A theme is just a set of PHP files, with no limits of what code they can contain.

WordPress has lacked Core-provided theme customization options for years. So each theme developer came up with their own. All this code needs to be checked for security, which is difficult as no automated tooling (WPCS) is used.

Now FSE will help with that. It's a step in the right direction, and it could be a solution for many of these technical
issues. But it doesn't help with a larger issue that prevents experimentation.

After years themes still cannot opt out of features. Comments being an example. WordPress is still as monolithic as it was when it was first forked off B2.

Even if that were fixed, the interface of the directory still needs to be adapted so that users can find what they need. As in if I as a user need comments, I should only see themes that support them.

And this is not to mention the lack of developer tools. It's easy to blame guidelines for the lack of themes. And not the whole setup, which is entirely in Matt's control. Uploading a ZIP? In 2021?

This ongoing discussion about guidelines hides the fact that no good designer wants to jump through all these hoops to get his theme "out there".

This is not 2007, and theme creators are no longer hobbyists working on our weekend side projects. Design, development, support, marketing--if you want to make money with themes you need to
master all of these. Nobody will do that if they aren't getting rewarded for their knowledge and their work.

So if there are lots of well designed themes on other marketplaces, and not on .org, it's really not the fault of guidelines. By the way ThemeForest's guidelines are even stricter, both for technical aspects, and for design.

And it's not like the plugin repository is this astounding model of success. It has had its fair share of issues and continues to do so, for some of the same reasons.

Long story short: if the WordPress project lead wants a reposiory full of high quality themes, then he has the power and the financial resources to make it so. I mean who else is going to get this done? A handful of unpaid volunteers with little to no authority?