From my experience selling WordPress themes on ThemeForest I’ve realized a lot of customers don’t like using child theme’s for one reason or another and they prefer to manually alter their themes. This is a very bad habit because if you ever need to update the theme (updates usually fix issues, so you should always update) then you will lose all your modifications or you will have to do a manual update to ensure nothing gets overwritten which can lead to even greater problems.
To help fix this problem I have created a small plugin I call the “Total Tweaker” which is just a basic example of how you can actually tweak the theme via a plugin, this way if for some reason you hate child theme’s you can still make modifications to Total via the hooks and filters using a plugin (which you can also re-brand to whatever you want).