In reply to Alec Kinnear.

Poor engineering on an installed theme becomes apparent to a site owner when want to change themes.

Heated debates often occur because of a significant difference in values; see the abortion debate for an archetypical example.

In the case of this debate it seems the TRT and some users place a high value on the ability to switch themes and a low value of reducing effort and complexity required of an end-user interested in building a site. Then there are many other and it appears most theme developers who value the opposite.

Thus I would not say that inability to switch themes is "poor engineering" but instead a different in optimization preference.

Personally I think the TRT's position on the need for users to be able to switch themes ignores the valid preference of a significant portion of users. Many users would be perfectly happy to forgo any future ability to switch themes if it means that they were able to get a more feature-rich site built quickly with less expertise required.

If I were making the rules I would add a theme header option called "features" with a default value of "none" and potential other values of: "custom-post-type", "custom-taxonomy", etc. Then if the features included are not "none" when a user tries to activate said theme they would be given a full page overlay in large type that spells out the future horrors they will encounter upon switching themes and thus requires them to acknowledge before activating.

If this were done then this entire debate would be rendered moot and everyone(?) would be happy, no? That is unless of course the real motivation is that some on the TRT want to impose their values on others who do not share those values. Not that I've ever seen people want to impose their own values on others in this vast world of ours! ;-)

FWIW.