Hey Adam,
Thanks for your input on this and we greatly appreciate your feedback! When we created wanderers and elegant, we realize that most template clubs (because of their configurations / setup, it adds close to about 400 ms - 800 ms) of overhead.
Try to take a look at the initial page load for most of these templates. This is all due to the reason that the template has quite a substantial configuration / color schemes and last but not least, a template now has huge list of different layouts which makes it even more confusing for end users.
We went back and look at why Joomla 1.5 was a huge success and during that time, most of these templates only has very basic settings and doesn't require complex setup. It also has much lesser overhead because it doesn't do fancy stuffs.
Nevertheless, I appreciate your input on this matter and we'll see what we can do in the future to improvise on the current setup we have