Most agencies like to use ready-made premium themes from ThemeForest. And in each and EVERY case I had to use them, I also had to rework them. About 80% are not child-theme ready, and its a PITA to get them working properly. Also, ALL claim they are i18n-ready, esp. those for WooCommerce, but so far, ALL I tested broke when acutally using ANY kind of translation plugin (even the most "loved" WPML).

Not to mention each and everyone is cooking up their own framework, which in 90% of the cases is NOT easily enhanceable, so they mostly seem to work for themselves, getting the money shovelled back into the respective developers wallets (or IMNSHO out of the window).

The stakes for getting your theme onto the official WP theme repository are much higher, and THATS A GOOD THING. If ThemeForest would ACTUALLY PROPERLY test the themes they sell, market or whatever you might want to call it, AT LEAST at the same level, well.. yeah, 50% of those money-making machines wouldn't even get in. More time to for us developers who have to work with that stuff to ACTUALLY work on the site our clients want to get up and running, and not to be pestered with bug-ridden, horrible xt:Commerce-like roll-your-own-crappy-frameworkish code of yet another moron trying to reinvent the wheel.

[/rant]

cu, w0lf.