Why are people so critical of Theme Forest?

IMO, it's at least in good part because a lot of designers/developers would much rather charge a client $thousands than for them to pick a pre-made theme. (and especially on the design side, some of these same people also recommend not upgrading WordPress because doing so breaks things... eekkk!)

And, then there is Marcus' experience of having a theme developer stop support or have poor support (yes, that happened to me on my first pick too many years ago, and after that I did a lot more investigation of support, history, etc.).

And then, yes, there are a lot of not-so-great themes on there. But, it's kind of your job (if you're helping a client) to pick something good with a good support track record as the starting point. I suppose you can't always figure that out, but you can get a pretty good idea with a bit of digging.

Dan, just curious, but what non-TF themes are you recommending?