Customers pay their membership:
1. To have access to our extensive portfolio of templates.
2. To obtain the latest versions of those template with bug fixes and to maintain compatibility with current Joomla versions and PHP versions (just look at our products update to see how often and how many updates we are releasing
http://www.rockettheme.com/product-updates
) - this takes a huge amount of resource.
3. To have access to the support forums and get the assistance of our moderation team with any issues you may in using RT products.
4. To have access to new templates as and when we release them (which is less frequent than it was say 5 years ago). Our membership did request that rather than releasing lots of template that instead we concentrated on delivering high quality templates and more "niche" templates (specific to market sectors) where we can and this is what we have been doing for the last couple of years. So, yes our focus is on quality rather than quantity.
5. To have access to older templates that have been converted to run on the Gantry 5 framework. We've been working hard on converting our Gantry 4 porfolio of templates to the Gantry 5 framework. This "conversion" is in fact a complete redevelopment of the original Gantry 4 template and is in reality a brand new template. We provide these new templates a no extra charge to those members that have a subscription that enables them to download the old Gantry 4 templates.
I would also point out that when we release a new template we do this for three CMSs (Joomla, Wordpress, and GRAV).
So, I can assure you that our development team is working extremely hard with the limited development resources that we have.