This was a really good read (took a long time because I read most of the comments too). I've been following Theme Forest for many years and watched the progression, especially watching select authors that have been there a long time such as Kreisi. As a theme designer, I will admit seeing what kind of money you can make there is like being a kid in a candy store.

Theme Forest is an enigma because when you see certain themes get crazy sales from the start and continue until you become like Enfold, The7, Avada, and several others, you sit there scratching your head trying to establish what is it that caused the sales to climb from the start. To say that the more features, the more plugins included, or simply being a multipurpose theme is not entirely accurate because most themes there are all those things. Still to this day I try to analyze what causes this phenomenon where certain themes generate millions of dollars. At this point in time, Avada has 117,107 sales ($6.8 Million). Avada was the first theme by the developer(s) and look at what happened in just 2.5 years.

Theme Forest provides the WOW factor for the end-users. They see themes saturated with so many features, they are quick to buy. For the record, when you first see the theme demos, many do look amazing in visual effects, so why wouldn't someone be enticed! Which is why the elite authors there are so happy if they reach the crazy sales that many achieve. Standards are not on their minds, only creating the wow factor is what is important....whatever it takes to make $$$$. The same goes for Envato, because they are running a business to make money and as much profit as they can get; one has to respect that.

However, I have purchased a few themes over the last year or so, and I can definitely say that although the demo for the themes look amazing, their code is an absolute NIGHTMARE, even elite authors code (no names to be mentioned, but they are popular theme millionaires). If you want to make any custom changes, good luck with that. Even as a developer myself, I looked at the code and file/template structure of one theme in particular and I was thinking, OMG, forget it! As for standards? I yet to see a theme that would pass any review process from wp.org/wp.com ....The theme I tried out uses a popular page builder, so I wanted to see what happens if I used this theme then switched themes....long story short, it was a complete disaster. Here are some details about this one theme:

• 19 CSS files loaded
• 26 javascripts
• And a mess of code – compliments of the Visual Composer page builder
• Their widget columns, 6 nested containers for one text based widget.
• Over 27,000 lines of CSS
• The functions.php and the additional “includes” of other function files go well over 20,000 lines of code…the functions.php itself has 1800 lines of code.

One thing to consider is how much support (if any) these TF theme authors are having to provide to their customers, because when you look at most of them, they are quite busy, and they have to provide several updates. That should tell you something right there.

I've designed a lot of themes in the past, but I believe the way to go is to make them look amazing but to ensure code is "quality" and kept to the WP standards. The idea is to keep the non-developer end-users in mind so they can have themes that are scalable, flexible, stable, compatible, and capable of switching themes without discovering your pages and posts have psychedelic looking layouts and code showing up. Overall, most of the themes on TF are built for developers and not so much of the typical end-user who may want to make some custom changes.

Envato is definitely making insane cash, but I would love to see them work side-by-side with WordPress to ensure standards are used and code quality is enforced. I will admit that some of the elite authors there are quite talented, but they use that talent to bloat their themes.