Noticed this a while back, now i see its the second week… Just interested what happened?
Cheers
wooo, 
My guess but could be wrong - for some reason the plugin was not made compatible with WP 4.5 until the day 4.5 was released which forced people to purchase a license just to get their hands on the update quickly to fix 4.5 issues. Someone who got their license through purchase of a theme or through other means went for regular license to get support. Anyway good for the developer of the plugin and good for Envato.
Top 10-20 items are bringing lots of revenue for the marketplace while others are left to fend for themselves with abysmal sales and a 40 day waiting period to get a theme approved. I can keep releasing something like 10+, 50+, 120+, 190+ substandard themes/templates as one product that is in top 20 list with no review, no approval waiting period while even experienced authors who want to release a single lightweight theme are forced to wait in the queue for what feels like forever. Amazing transformation for what used to be beautiful place to work. This race for multi theme bundling in a single product have made life nightmarish for even established authors. No matter how creative you are and how niche your product is, sales are much harder to come by.
Yes the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Envato does not have any interest to address this in any way.
There were numerous suggestions made, like if you go with popular list make them as mobile stores and expand it…
popular multi-purpose, popular niche, popular in specific niche etc.
What they did they combined the rest as ecommerce categories, psd, sketch under ui design which doesn’t even have popular any more…
or actually remove popular list as in psd and focus more on search.
But no steps were made actually.
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Why would they make that change when a single theme in top 5 is selling much more than a hundred new themes approved during the week? This place is starting to feel more and more like first page of Google search - once you get into top 3 or 5 of search, others are ignored and revenue generated from these top ranking results is much more than the rest that cannot make it to the list.
there is a slight difference that Google search lists more or less relevant results, and many users are get used to the fact that you’ll probably find relevant result on 1st or 2nd page, rarely on 3 + pages … Google has no categories, featured items and so on and it’s basically very different in its nature.
About VC sales - this way, instead of being penalized in some way, for update issues, WP Bakery got rewarded with more sales, and higher sales numbers will generate even more sales … Life is not fair 
And many of the buyers are getting used to searching for what they need within the first 5-10 themes since multiple themes of different niches/categories are being bundled into one. They are sure the authors of these themes will support them well due to high stakes involved and themes are not going to go away or stay neglected due to lack of interest.
You’re right at some point, but Google results don’t display multipurpose results. Imagine, you Google search for Bentley, and first five results are like “Bentley with bundled 5 engines, added few BMW’s - value $200.000” … You get my point.
Envato is marketplace, Google isn’t - it’s business is completely different … But, this is really a different topic.
I know one thing for sure - we will abandon bundling VC in our new themes, and I believe other theme authors should do that, too. Generally speaking - Envato should not allow bundling premuim CodeCanyon (or any other) plugins.