Integrated Theme Panel and review requirements

Dear Community,

I’m writing this thread in connection to the new (comparing to few years back) review requirements. It’s about the requirement of including some truly main functionalities of the theme like Theme Options panel in a separate plugin i.e. I’d like to include Redux Framework that is basically a core of the template but I no longer can because the review process will not let me do that because Redux uses dozen of functions and methods that are not allowed.

This is of course not a problem for a theme developer as it’s just a matter of moving some files to a separate plugin that we use anyway for custom post types but it’s about the initial user feel. For instance: a person purchases a new theme that was approved with the new requirements, activates the theme and notices that… there is no Theme Options panel. I don’t have any numeric statistics about it but I’m pretty sure some people might get disappointed or confused by that… “Well, something is wrong” may be one of their reactions… While on the other hand they activate one of the current top selling themes that don’t have to follow the new requirements and see most of the functionalities including the Options panel straight away and say “Well, that’s much easier here!”.

That’s just my two cents. Just out of curiosity: did anyone get their theme approved recently with a fully integrated Redux Framework theme options panel? How did you go about errors? Did you play and modify the framework’s core?

Kind Regards,
Filip