In reply to Ian Stewart.

Hi Ian,

Good design is not having unlimited design options and two hundred grid variations available from the control panel. Good design is a strong concept cleanly executed. The more options a theme has the further it probably is from good design. Certainly the more options there are, the less likely a theme is high performance.

That said, by enforcing use of the customizer for options, the theme review team is actually liberating users: whenever a user picks up a new theme, s/he'll already know how to optimise it.

No one has said that the customizer must stay as it is. I believe the hope is that with more use, additional creativity and code will go into making the customizer the simplest and most powerful theme customiser on any platform. A unified vision is important to progressive development. There are hundreds of Linux distributions available and yet as a desktop platform use is still under 1%. I'd love to move from OS X to Linux but the maintenance burden and transition cost is just too high.

The theme review team putting its foot down about what goes into the repository means there is a hope for a common space and common good practices and progressive development (a cycle of improvements). The alternative is the steady fracturing of the Wordpress platform as each theme developer tries to pull the sheet in his or her own direction. All site portability would be lost as clean migration from one theme to another would be as painful as Typepad to Wordpress migration.

Is anyone else veteran enough to remember the Thesis Wars when developer Chris Pearson openly denigrated the Wordpress platform in his marketing, claiming that any Wordpress site not running Thesis is second-rate? Commercial developers are not the second coming and should respect the platform on which they build, instead of trying to destroy it.

The basic principle of theme = design and plugin = functionality is essential for site portability. One can move one's plugins from theme to theme but not additional functionality hidden in custom formats. It's clear the commercial developers are in love with lock-in. Losing the ability to sell "value added" features will be a marketing loss to them. It also means their users will be free to choose another theme when the time comes.

Yes, I am an unrelenting advocate for data portability and against lock-in. Having rescued many hundreds of sites from platform lock-in, I know exactly what lock-in looks like and the price the publisher pays to extricate him or herself. There's no excuse on earth to practice lock-in on our Wordpress publishers. We promised them freedom and portability and I for one intend to honour that promise.