Can’t trust a premium theme? commentary

My dealings over the last few months trying to promote the Market Theme has made it a lot more obvious to me that the Wordpress community still is not fully acceptive of premium (pay to download / use) themes. But should that be the case?

There’s a certain stigma that comes every time you mention Wordpress in a sentence - everything revolving around it should be free and available to everyone. There are thousands upon thousands of themes and plugins out there which gracious designers and developers put loads of time and effort into - only to make them available for free to the public. So how could any designer or developer try capitalizing on the same type of items that others have made for free?

A theme is a site design - and not everyone seems to realize that.

Most premium Wordpress themes (and even plugins) require some cash for good reason. You are generally not going to find any premium themes that have the same look and/or functions of the 95% of free themes, because the use of the free theme will always trump the premium theme use if there is nothing special about the premium theme. This is a pretty easy concept to understand, but yet not everyone seems to get it. I have yet to see a [great] looking premium theme that cost any more than $100 for a single / standard license, but yet there are plenty in the community who will bitch and complain that $50, $60, and etc are way to much for any Wordpress theme - no matter what its feature set and look is.

That to me is a major problem and a considerable fault in the Wordpress community. A theme is a site design - and not everyone seems to realize that. With any Wordpress theme, you’re indeed getting a site design, the only difference is it has been stripped of its full originality. Still, there are free and premium themes out there that could easily cost hundreds or thousands of dollars if they were only sold off once, so how anyone could complain about the under $100 fee most premium themes have is a little ridiculous - especially when there are people out there paying a couple thousand to have Wordpress just installed.