I've never understood, agreed with this bundling of premium plugins in themes for many reasons.

Themes are themes, plugins are plugins, if you mix the two in this manner inside this eco system, as per these 1000 themes, then this is what will eventually happen unfortunately. Of course if things were in place to offer auto updates to plugins to those who didn't actually buy the plugin this wouldn't be an issue.

Envato set out the rules, they have ultimate control on what is accepted for sale. Maybe this policy needs heavy review, but then I feel if they do not allow this bundling, many buyers will not like the fact that they have to purchase a plugin, and many authors will feel that their 'edge' on sales of saying $400 of plugins are 'included' will cause issues. Educating both authors and buyers would be needed for sure, to make all parties understand that it's simply not the way to go. Offer support for a plugin for sure, just don't 'bundle'. Envato may however see this as a negative to the bottom line and cause buyers to complain about what they get for their $45.

This now proves that this practice isn't good for anyone and I am sure they will attempt to make changes, exactly what and when will be a matter of time I am sure. Having email notifications when an item is updated is OK but they have that switched off by default I believe - never understood why no one would want notification so it shouldn't even be an option in my opinion.

I do commend Envato on their swift efforts in attempting to reach out to buyers, theme authors etc. to get the issues fixed but feel it will be a hard hill to climb. I worry that potential buyers will again see this as a reason not to buy a theme from ThemeForest.

We came under a little pressure when we decided to not include plugins (bundle), and more so when we created our own plugins for free that anyone can use and we ship from our own site. We did this so we had full control over development and updates. Also we contemplated offering via the WP.org plugin repository but that would mean we would have to supply support, on another system, that would demand human resources we can't really afford to offer. It was a decision I contemplated for some time and ultimately did what I thought was best.

I will say that we also do not have automatic updates for our plugins / themes and rely on our support forums, social media, email list and envato notifications and that is not good, we realize this. However, we are looking at a new system that will notify users of our themes of updates automatically and hope to have updates to our existing themes that will add this function here shortly so that we can better serve our buyers.

Unfortunately I feel that, with 1,000 themes there will be issues for buyers as there may be an amount of theme abandonment - hence no updates to the theme and Envato will need to deal with that somehow.