I agree that there are many users who have ‘relatively recently moved away from using themes’, but this is part of RW’s problem. If Stacks did happily serve these basic users, it would be a different matter. I look back at the journey I‘ve made with RW, and the opposite has been the case: I came to it originally because a friend enthused about it and wanted me to create a theme for him (this is pre-Stacks). We did that, but building the site he wanted in that theme pushed RW to its limits, involving vast amounts of inline css. When Stacks came along, those we were using (I remember early versions of ‘moving box’ ‘mootools’ and others) were really hard to work out, or get to work properly. Fortunately stackmaking has come a long way since then.
My friend soon after abandoned RW for Wordpress (which, to be honest, was much more suitable for his needs). I stuck with Stacks, as by then I’d built a few — much simpler — themes for sites for myself and my partner. But even as stacks have become better, they still involve large amounts of troubleshooting — that’s been my experience. For instance, I loved the idea of Foundation when it came out, but I had it for a year before I could get past the problems I was having with TopBar. There was no proper documentation (Joe had written a good guide to RW5, but information on his own products was pretty sketchy) and there weren’t the forums we have now. Eventually, I mastered Foundation, via Screens (which made me realise I needed some kind of container stack, and then there was Sections). It’s still the case that, until I‘ve spent half a day putting a new stack through its paces — and have some kind of project to create with it — I don’t know where I’m going with it. And some have been massive timewasters: RapidCart has provided countless hours of frustrating troubleshooting over the years (and still does). Sometimes it could be one little syntax issue, which the stackmaker had omitted to mention, which made the difference between something working or not.
This long-winded explanation is the the reason I can’t, in all conscience, recommend RW/Stacks to the user who has ‘relatively recently moved away from using themes’, even now. Stacks have got easier to use, to a degree, but many of the stacks we have now are also an order of magnitude more complex than those original ones. They’re not just ‘plug and play’ — making a Poster blog, for instance, can be like assembling a 10,000 piece Lego set. I love Poster, and appreciate its power, but like so many other stacks, it doesn’t just do its thing. (Indeed, Sections Pro, which is the Swiss Army Knife of Stacks, doesn’t just do its thing either — a weekend workshop would probably only cover its basics).
Given that this is where we are with stacks — with an environment which gives us access to powerful, but often complex, tools — I think we need to recognise it. It works very well for a certain kind of user. It works very well now for me. That’s just like saying Photoshop works very well for a certain kind of user — of whom, fortunately for Adobe, there are a vast number. Day 1 of Photoshop, though, is a minor hell for someone who is completely new to it.