In reply to Stephen Cronin.

@Stephen you said everything I came here to comment about. I think this issue is similar to a conference talk. Let's assume that you attended a conference (WHICH WAS FREE) and sat across a speaker who spent the right amount of time preparing the talk, flying out to the venue and has given a bad talk (as per your perspective, not the speaker's). At the end of his talk, and two more times during the speech, he told you about how you can hire him or buy his services/products.

Now here's what your options were. You could have gotten up and left the talk since you didn't seem to enjoy what he spoke about. Instead, you stayed, you listened to all he had to offer, some of it might even have helped you, and since it was all for FREE there was no harm done was there? But now you are speaking against his talk and being vocal about why he is a bad speaker, why his talk was crap, why he oversold himself and blah blah.

This is just my perspective, but I think that speaker (however bad his talk was, however, cheesy and obtrusive his marketing skills were) he spent a good deal of time on his talk, he is a human being (we tend to forget this part), he's gotta pay his bills, he's trying to make a living there. You don't like what he did for you for FREE (Expenses in the form of his time and the flight/hotel bills) sure, get up and don't listen to his talk, go home, don't care about his cheesy marketing.

No harm was done, ain't no body forced you to sit through his entire speech (i.e. use his free theme) and get offended by his cheesy marketing(i.e. those obstructive nags and paywall options). You have the choice to just not use it if you don't like and he will start to figure things out for himself or will stop speaking (building themes for free) once in for all.

IMHO this would be a decent way of dealing with a bad speaker and his marketing efforts. But to cut off the speaker's marketing hand and to ask him to pay all those bills and not talk about anything that could lead him to earn a living with his talk (i.e. theme/WordPress), I think it is every bit against the concept of diversity and openness of that community.

Again, this is just my perspective and an opinion about this whole thing. Buyers dictate what they want, if it is not good for them, it doesn't sell, and what doesn't sell doesn't exist for long.