I'd like to know what TF themes Marcus thinks are adequate enough to refer people to, since he mentioned this once or twice in the show. I'm willing to believe there are some TF themes that are possibly on par with the best non-TF themes, but frankly I'm skeptical. I have only ever worked with TF themes when forced to, in order to bail out or support an existing site that was always bad for all the reasons you mention in this episode. I'm not surprised to learn someone was selling a TF theme that relied on the deprecated Google Maps 2.0 API only days before Google finally shut it down, and then the theme vendor never issued an update.