[lhorie]

I have, and I somewhat disagree. I agree that it can feel dirty to your programmer sensibilities when you start from the base template one and go "building from the ground up", but if you set expectations accurately with the client (and yourself) wrt the amount of flexibility a theme gives and what type of work you're going to be doing, you can get some pretty high quality themes (where "quality" here refers to the template's ability to fulfill the goal of offering a feature-rich GUI to non-techies). Some themes are so elaborate that you can change virtually every aspect of the template down to the most granular levels directly from the admin interface.

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).