In a reply to my reply to his initial post, Holger (@foobartel) writes:

(…) Yet, those frameworks have allowed their sameness to creep in, default designs to be seen for how websites “should” look like today. Even though frameworks were only meant for prototyping and as a starting point to build upon, they have made their mark in terms of design. With a lack of understanding of the craft and its underlying techniques, it’s difficult to change and modify the defaults, to be creative and unique.

The interesting thing here is, (speaking from an economic point-of-view) that this sets the frame in which $clients are biased towards what they expect a website to be. So it gets increasingly harder with each new "same" (everyfuckingwebsite dot com) website that launches, to work outside, to surprise and to sell that. (On a side note, have you read about the Uber and Lyft drivers who played the system by simultaniously logging of the app; resulting in an increase in demand and a surge in fees? Maybe we webworkers could pull a similar stunt…)
And of course there's a myraid of so-called web-design studios who are making quite a good living out of that; selling the same website over and over again to different clients.
And there is a market for that. And in that market it is exceptional ungrateful to hope for honoration and acknowledgement of truly creative solutions.
Sadly, this market is where we are swimming in.
From the bottom the market is capped by the budgets that are available. Here, truly fresh and innovative things may be possible, but sadly for honour only since there is no money around. From the top the market is capped by the large ad-networks and enterprises; here large budgets are available, but seldom does this trickle down to small studios or single experts - in this market, creative decisions happened way up the ladder and we are hired for our (technical) skillset or because the ad-networks cannot provide enough woman-power on their own and have to sub-contract.

And why change in the first place, it’s what everybody uses. It’s tested. It’s trusted. It’s confirmed.
How could the masses be so wrong?

Coming back to the framework/theme "standard", I wonder if this really just is laziness, or if the rather boring "holy grail" look is like the frontpage design of newspapers, where some elements like the masthead have proven to work better under the circumstances (i.e. the display at the news-stand, where only the upper part of the page is visible).

We are constantly challenged by shifting technologies, but in the end the user, their device and their situation is what counts - and for most users, a boring, but easy to understand experience will always trump an "exciting" one where every interface element has to be learned and discovered anew.

May we live in an interesting web.