I hope this the right way to get support - I cannot find any other way to contact anyone for help or support through envato.com or themeforest.com
We bought and paid for theme: ‘Webapp’, it comes with a bunch of plugins recommended, one of these is ‘Visual Composer’
are we going to have to buy this plugin as well? (if so we’d rather get a refund thank you very much)
Or is there some other reason / something we’re missing / that we can’t get it to work properly in the page editor, or some way to “activate” the plugin so that it does actually work?
Without that plugin, it seems like we have no sane way to edit the pages or change the slider (slider plugin errors out when trying to activate)
You do not have to activate this plugin license for it to work, activation would be possible only if you purchased your own license for this plugin (this is same for all premium bundled plugins on Envato). HOWEVER, this seems to be a very outdated version of this plugin in the first place, since it was renamed to WPBakery Page Builder long time ago.
And same goes to Slider Revolution plugin, very outdated version. The theme itself was not updated for four years so no wonder it packs old plugins as well.
Just get in touch with the author if he will be able to resolve this. If not, ask for a refund and just move to a more up to date theme.
Pay attention to last update date displayed on the right side of the item description when purchasing a theme. It is a huge red flag if theme was not updated for several months let alone years.
