I'd happily never customize a theme again if there were any other easy way to actually pick the background and foreground colors on all of my apps. I like having white text on a black background, not a "dark" gray background and white text (and certainly not some off-white background with some dark but not fully black text, which I find even worse than just a typical black text on white background theme). I'm well aware of the fact that it probably does nothing in terms of actually affecting the battery life of my devices, and that dark gray is considered "better" from design perspective, but I don't care, because I happen to like the way the color scheme I describe looks, and I don't see why it should matter whether it does to anyone else if it's just going to be on a device that I'm the only one who ever uses. For whatever reason, this is next to impossible to do without rolling my own GTK theme (not even just using one that someone else had made, because I literally couldn't find one that just changed the background to black without having a bunch of other opinionated decisions on icons and padding and stuff), so that's what I do. I'm grateful that this is even possible though, because apps that aren't GTK (or Qt, which is also possible to theme) often don't provide any ability to theme whatsoever. With the exception of coding editors, I'm not sure I've ever found an Electron app that actually lets me pick a fully black background color, so despite not being particularly dogmatic in my opposition to them, I always try to run stuff like Slack and Discord in the browser so I can theme them with custom CSS. (I'm vaguely aware that this might be possible to do with the electron apps as well by running in some sort of developer mode, but I can't be bothered to spend a bunch of time trying to replicate what I already have working in the browser for their sites).
Expressing their argument as "don't use custom themes" just makes it less convincing when there aren't really any other easy ways to get the flexibility from them that doesn't cause any of the issues they cite. It would be like finding out that a friend or relative uses the same password for every site, and then trying to get to them to install a package manager by uninstalling Windows and switching to Linux at the same time. Mixing together subjective personal preferences with objective technical advice just dilutes the latter to the point where it's impossible to find it compelling.
I hadn't heard of this, but from googling, if you mean this (https://www.omglinux.com/gnome-accent-colors-are-coming/), that doesn't seem to do what I want. It doesn't affect the background color, and it hard-codes a list of colors that don't include what I want as my background color anyhow, so it wouldn't help me even if it did.
Open source is about taking back control over your software. The sentiment of that website is absurd to me. What I do on/to my own system is nobody else's business. (Though I don't really change much of the theming myself. Changed a few colors slightly and of course the desktop wallpaper.)
The sentiment still stands. I can't fault distros from wanting to theme their distro to match their branding. Like, Ubuntu wouldn't be Ubuntu without their signature orange and aubergine colors, Mint and openSUSE have their greens, and SteamOS' have their polished Vapor theme etc. And as an end user and a perpetual distro-hopper, I really appreciate that. I like the consistency that well-made distro themes provide, plus it makes you feel like you're actually using that distro, as opposed to some generic Linux with a vanilla GNOME/KDE shell on top.
Sounds fine to me, but these applications are already open source. If you're going to modify and repackage them, at least update the links to the bug tracker to your own.
The consistency is nice and all, but more than once have I seen distro replace a "stop" button with something they deemed similar enough that didn't make any sense in several applications that used them. I've also seen themes mess with spacing, hiding button rows or stretching them in weird ways. On a glance it all looks nice, but when you're using them applications look weird and broken.
Themes are nice, but unless there's an official theming feature (like with the new Gnome accent colours) it's the duty of a distro to inform their users that theme related UI glitches are the distro's fault, and I have seen none of them bother to communicate that.
In the mid 2000's, I loved trying different themes. These days I just take whatever is the default for Gnome, which is remarkably sane, usually more comfortable than a Mac, and consistent.
Some themes solve real problems, especially for the visually impaired, but that's not the norm. It's a fun work of art, but the utility is always limited. More often than I like to admit, I was left with a broken desktop after attempting to uninstall a theme that didn't work well enough (or at all), and that couldn't be fixed by installing another on top of it.
There are more pressing issues in Gnome than to provide a stable theme API.
Expressing their argument as "don't use custom themes" just makes it less convincing when there aren't really any other easy ways to get the flexibility from them that doesn't cause any of the issues they cite. It would be like finding out that a friend or relative uses the same password for every site, and then trying to get to them to install a package manager by uninstalling Windows and switching to Linux at the same time. Mixing together subjective personal preferences with objective technical advice just dilutes the latter to the point where it's impossible to find it compelling.