Buy a theme or create your own?

[lennpet]

Magento newbie, but developer last 30 years (mostly backend). Taking my e-com from Prestashop to Magento but can't decide about the frontend. Honestly don't have that many requirements on special-special, just a plain storefront. Actually Luma with a couple of modules would be ok. Thinking more of what would be best long term...

• Buy a theme. Quickest solution, yes, but I will probably have a lot of functionality that I will not use. Hate bloated code... Any recomendations?
• Start with Luma, buy a couple of nice modules and just go from there
• Hm, Less --> Sass. Maybe smartest to start with Snowdog's new blank sass theme. Isn't that the future of M2, or? But it smells a lot of work, doesn't. I want to sell, not be a frontend developer primarily.

Best

/L

[Sinisa]

If there is a possibility to develop your own theme by extending Luma, it would be great.

From my experience, the majority of themes come with:

1. you'll feel like you're in hell while trying to modify CSS because majority of themes have code-generated CSS (for functionalities like changing font/color of various items from Magento Admin).

2. tightly coupled code - if you change something, you'll be probably in trouble

3. too many features which you do not need

4. performance bottlenecks because of poor development practice (at least what I saw)

5. potential security issues which could come with extensions which are not validated by Magento

Again, this is from my experience.