This whole conversation has been nice and all. While I didn't read all of the comments I got a general idea of what's going on.

1. Pixelgrade builds themes and as a results they get customers

They don't build a theme going after customers they want their themes to have integrity and be different from the rest and this is a very good mindset to have. Following trends can be bad since in the end can your lose yourself or business model in the process.

Let me say this:
I purchase Pile for my on site and it works. There are things I'd like to change and I really feel that a theme that was built in 2014 should have had everything change with their newest release (Pile 2) but there were a few things from the original design that remained I guess those things worked well so they kept them but to me I felt they were issues.

My suggestion regarding this whole $59-$225 I believe all their customers should have received a notification personally from Pixelgrade 1-2 months before the price hike (this would probably have cause a surge in sales) but more importantly it would have prepared many for this price change. Yes Envato sent out an email (which I didn't read due to email marketing and other Envato messages).

The 2nd suggestion I can make is to create another version of say Pile 3 and markup the price on that one. Similar to the whole Tweetbot approach. Of course this would have to be more modular as you will not want to stop supporting all the older versions. The older version will still remain but for the price You get a new framework and all it's features and you pay the premium price. THis way an existing designer can offer it to their client and sell them the features and why they would need them.

Now that price has change existing users have to pay $150+ for support. Which I think if there has been an underlining issue with the theme the developer should fix it for an individual. But any thing else a person should pay for support.