They treat them differently, very differently, like treating designers not
seriously. How many designers have asked in 3 years for web standard templates/design (nope, I'm not the only one, and I came quite late)? The vBCSS project (after I was banned even)? What was the reaction each and
every time?
Marco, staff already overlooks design requests -- Eric Meyers could come in and post why this tabled layout would need to go the way of the Dodo, and they'd ignore or would argue against it. If some coding guru came around with a nifty idea, they'd be tripping over themselves to get the code implimented like yesterday (as the AJAX/plugins issue showed by example -- couldn't let Matt get that coding leg up).
Look what happened to vbulletin-templates? The website, with all the restrictions it had that designers could not modify code in any shape or size, just templates? Remember?
Very real oil and water, when we need to mix cocktails together.