I find that believable because Thesis was a waste of money. I'm more comfortable picking and choosing which plugins and themes I want to use and getting into the code if I have to. Thesis never came me anything faster than I could do with the those things alone. Their most compelling argument to me was the structure/SEO claims which were never well explained. None of my sites, Thesis or otherwise, ever did well from an SEO standpoint, so in that respect I have no preference.

To me it seems like they just got popular because they were promoted on Copyblogger with a huge readership and all of it's partners/affiliates. You can't go to a site about copywriting/SEO/online marketing/Wordpress/blogging without getting hit over the head about how "Thesis is the greatest thing ever".