The value is not in how much time I spend doing it. The value is in the 10 years I spent learning how to do it. If you can find someone in India to do it for cheaper, then don't come to me. Period. Seen plenty of freelancer.com brilliance out there. That's what you deserve.
The author is talking about Wordpress not being easy. You are wrong in that the developer nets $25K per theme. Most of these themes have less than 100 sales so a $50 theme nets less than $5000 for the developer.
Further to that most of these themes now have a very good customizer so even your average Joe can customize it to their liking.
The discussion is absolutely not about value. Its about the author talking about wordpress not being easy. Amazon AWS is not easy and yet they have managed to increase their revenue. If a non technical person can set-up a wordpress and be able to use it then truly it has done a good job of being easy.
I did not say the developers were ripping people off. I did not even talk about the value the developers provide. You assumed that I was talking about developers ripping people off which in some way reflects your own inferiority complex about this issue. I read the previous response and neither is that person saying what you are perceiving.
I had a barely competent lawn mover talk to me about a website and after 30 minutes of discussion was able to get a smallorange hosting , use the script installer , watch some videos and was able to set up a nice little website.
He did make a couple of phone calls to me in the middle but in less than a day he was setup. After pointing to themeforest he now has a website that developers charge 3-4K for.
Wordpress is really easy and if the audience is not competent utilizing it then maybe a network hosted like wix seem an alternative.
Not sure if this demands a discussion.