Have you ever tried to modify a wordpress theme? It's a nightmare. And we are proffessional developers. Imagine the pain this must be for mere webdsigners.
Fixing the mess that is wordpress is a very nobel goal.
Fixing the mess that is wordpress is a very nobel goal.
The ones you can buy however are a nightmare for sure, so are most of the copy-pasted-glued-together ones.
And where wordpress really shines is in the ecosystem. Subscription list popups, SEO, social media integration etc are just a few things that clients commonly want that take far less time to integrate into wordpress than building from scratch (because it's fairly common that authors of less popular developer-centric CMS'es didn't think to implement those things).
In my experience, WordPress is not built for developers or designers. It's built to be simple and extensible from the end-user's point of view. Most end-users don't expect absolute perfection and accept that it will do 90% of what they want. As long as it keeps doing that, no one will care what a "mess" the insides of it are.
...except the poor bastard who will have to build the website and maintain it.