That's a good public letter. I've looked at many themes from numerous providers; while they look good, many of them have built-in custom types (e.g. portfolio), shortcodes, sliders, widgets etc out the wazoo. Not only that, but these providers often seem hung up on using their own custom control panels, supposedly in the name of power and flexibility. I want to be able to use my own favored mix of plugins, and to use my own custom types and functionality.

There's so many popular, useful, and robust plugins out there to add functionality. Theme builders would do well to add structure and styles to work with these plugins, instead of reinventing the wheel. To be fair, I don't expect existing themes to be changed en masse overnight, if at all, but I'm still waiting for a clear indicator that theme devs have gotten on the minimal-functionality-in-themes bandwagon.