Maybe I'm just biased towards blank themes, but _s is fantastic.

https://github.com/Automattic/_s

Not a theme, but a blank slate.

All of the one's I've made from scratch!

I'm personally not a big fan of adopting someone else's standards or tastes. This very thing is way so many websites look alike. Thanks to Bootstrap, Zurb, WP, and more...

Sorry to be negative... :)

Qards also worth a try :) - http://designmodo.com/qards/

My favourite wordpress theme : http://thoughts-theme.pixelrevel.com

My personal favourite is www.wpmedium.com

Disclaimer: I made it.

Who cares? Use Craft.

I'm a bit biased as I'm the creator, but I'm pretty pleased with 'Collections', done for the Theme Foundry :) https://demo.thethemefoundry.com/collections-theme/

Salient is super flexible, robust, and very clean.

I really like Salient. Been using it for a month or so on moonbase.com and it's great. Tried a few of the other frontrunners (Divi, Stockholm) but I found Salient to be the easiest to work with and appropriate for what I needed -- which was a super simple one-pager with the potential for a blog down the line.

http://themeforest.net/item/salient-responsive-multipurpose-theme/4363266

There is a direct relationship between the subject and the purpose in question, but in the category news/blog I really like what was done here Harvard Law Review

I started playing around with Wordpress late last year and this is the first theme I made: SimbiosMais. Not ready yet, but will serve as a blog to a school in my town.

Moustachey (http://www.meanthemes.com/theme/moustachey/)

Actually it’s hard to take one name because each theme has its own specialty. Last year when I was seeking for a free template associated with music category, different people advised me with their different opinions. Instead of being confused with those dissimilar recommendations I preferred to search myself. After a while, I came to know about http://innulled.com/music-pro-v3-2-8-music-oriented-wordpress-theme/ that was having maximum of the features those I need. Rest of the functionalities I appended by simply installing correlated plugins. Must say, it was a great decision to opt this theme… its working terrifically!

I've always constructed my themes from scratch.

http://emilolsson.com/hi-response/ has always looked intriguing, used for:

http://studioremote.net/http://wearebuild.com/http://boyce.io/

The Bones starter theme is so well commented that I was able to finally build a true custom theme without a ton of PHP knowledge.

Be sure to load up your own grid tho.

https://github.com/eddiemachado/bones

On rachelisaweso.me/ok i'm using LESS Theme which is super simple, clean, and was ridiculously easy to modify colors and use my own typekit fonts with.

I use a theme framework and build custom child themes all the time.

The theme framework is called Unyson.

_s and Roots are my favourite starter themes.

My favourite themes are:

Hazelhttp://demo.select-themes.com/hazel/

Stockholmhttp://demo.select-themes.com/stockholm/

Storyhttp://pexetothemes.com/demos/story_wp/front-page/

That Semplice-stuff is pretty rad.

Looks a bit like the other squarespacy things posted here (quards etc.)

It's good and a steal at $89. Took me some time to wrap my head around since it's built on Wordpress but really playing by its own rules. But try it, it rocks.

Twenty Twelve.

http://www.anthony-robertson.com/words/2014/12/02/why-twenty-twelve-is-my-favorite-wordpress-theme/

I use The Pagelines DMS.

Pros: - Can cut development time significantly. Very fast to create responsive layouts. Good when you want to have a "landing page" type of templates (different kind of sections, videos, widgets, boxes of text, one pagers etc) and not just a blog and pages that have a one block of content - Very developer friendly - Templating system is pretty amazing and the option to create custom coded sections is very nice - Good support - Pretty much everything is still possible with for example the NextBox, so you can just drag and drop pieces of PHP

Cons - Monthly cost - Some of the sections etc are more "fancy" than practical and are aimed at audience that perhaps doesn't understand web design that well. - Some small bugs and annoyances

I love Divi, it is a quick and easy way to make a lot of different kind of website.