Ghost has lots of free themes, many without subscribe buttons and without membership focus, these are available now - just as they always have been - on our Marketplace.
Doesn’t make much sense to get upset about a default theme that nobody is forcing you to use. You can even use the original Casper from Ghost v0.3 if you like - some people still do.
Ghost 4.0 added new functionality which is specifically inline with what we have always set out to do: Create platform for professional publishing. This has been our stated use-case since 2013, and has not changed. We have always been working towards adding more features that professional users need.
The vast majority of serious publishers on the web try to grow an audience, and collect email subscribers as a way to do that — which is what members in Ghost enables.
If you want to have a Ghost for a personal blog, that’s fine too - but our product has never been hobby-blogging, and honestly is not the best choice for that use-case anyway. Check out Basecamp’s new Hey World service, which is absolutely perfect for personal usecases:
Lastly
There is a roadmap for Ghost where we don’t just share what’s being worked on, but you can literally follow every single piece of code being committed in realtime. In fact there were multiple community members tweeting and sharing the features of 4.0 long before we announced them.
But if you put no effort in, you get no results back :)
To be clear: We will continue to grow and focus on subscriptions and professional publishing. If you don’t like those features, you will not like Ghost 5, 6, or 7 — which is ok, there are plenty of other great platforms out there, and there’s never been more options to choose from, so it should be pretty easy to find something that matches what you’re looking for.
We focus, primarily, on feedback from users who do want the things we’re working on - which, as should be pretty easy to see from the response to the 4.0 launch - is a pretty substantial number of people.