I was an early adopter and have had an Elegant Themes account membership since May 2011. Nick Roach, the founder of Elegant Themes presented many attractive and creatively named themes available to download as a subscriber with no restrictions on the number of downloads possible or installs.
The Divi theme was released in 2013 by Nick Roach and his development team with a lot of bravura, but to be honest, at the time, I had discovered a few other themes and wasn’t that willing to invest in the learning curve.
Still, I renewed my yearly subscription for no reason other than to have access to their excellent blog and expertise on everything WordPress. But as I began noticing the new features and excellent reviews, my curiosity about re-visiting Divi grew. They developed their own Divi Page Builder, which was even available to download and use with other themes.
Over the years, Divi has become a work of art. It has a fairly steep initial learning curve to use the built-in Divi page builder, but I find it is far better than Elementor or WPBakery Page Builder after years of effort with both of those. I’ve recently used the Tatsu Builder (with Gutenberg) for a few client support projects where I inherited finished sites.
I started new projects with Divi and really dug in to learn all the bells and whistles including mastering its library and theme builder. I’ve invested in some exception extensions that enable me to customize and my productivity has improved.
With the recent demise, in my opinion, of the UDesign theme, I will no longer use it despite significant investment in numerous licenses. I have since converted all client sites built with UDesign to Divi, and these are either re-launched or pending launch. Henceforth, I will build sites I design and develop in Divi.
How wonderful it was when I saw the article cited below that so very closely documents my experiences and early feelings about Divi compared to how I feel today! Again, remember that I intensely dislike Gutenberg editor and some of the new features in WordPress… I have invested in a lifetime subscription, by the way.
A case for Divi in an evolving WordPress universe by Devin Egger (April 2022)