I totally understand the frustrations, but I think it's misleading and arguably defeatist to consider these as the only two options - there's more options, and the first two you've presented aren't (in my opinion) inherently awful choices. You can:
- Use Marketo's basic starter templates (which are designed to be a starting point)
- Expand your skill set by learning to code for email (a highly attractive skill in this industry) and how to use Marketo's simple and easy to use syntax within your HTML (i.e., include a few additional details to with ids and classes at appropriate sections to enable additional user-friendly functionality).
- Develop a strong business case to hire a developer with email specific knowledge (which is an awesome resource to have).
- Partner with other areas of your business who would benefit from developer resource to create a joint business case to hire one - noting that any decent email developer would be able to learn Marketo's syntax quickly, and many people with email development skills are multi-skilled in enormously beneficial areas such as web development, email/web design, UX, etc.
- Partner with one of the many knowledgeable and affordable third parties who can develop email templates that are specifically designed to suit both your brand and your in-editor requirements.
- Utilise one of the many third party plug ins mentioned in this thread to scale your email creation in a drag-and-drop style.
I'm sure there's more choices beyond that, too.
Equally, I think the expectation that Marketo should provide fully realised and comprehensive advanced email templates free-of-use is unrealistic and impractical. It doesn't really (in my opinion) make sense for Marketo to devote resources to developing advanced versions of their starter email templates, when:
- Most Marketo customers (particularly users above level 1 maturity) are likely to be using custom templates and wouldn't benefit from updates to the starter templates.
- A larger number of customers would benefit from investment in developing additional platform functionality instead.
- No two businesses needs are going to be the same for an email template - the starter templates are therefore designed to be as best fit for as many people based on the type of users who utilise them, and it would be incredibly difficult to develop advanced templates that would have high adoption for this same reason.
- Further to that, email clients are constantly evolving on what they do and don't accept, display, respond to, etc, so the more complicated an email template is, the more ongoing maintenance it's likely to require to ensure consistent responsivity across clients over time.
- And each database may have a completely different skew of dominant email clients that an email must be responsive across, so Marketo wouldn't have the benefit of being able to disregard or prioritise responsiveness across specific clients based on how that client is represented in your database, like can be done when you develop a custom one.
I'm not arguing that these difficulties you're experiencing aren't real or frustrating, actually the opposite - the fact that I've experienced those same frustrations is how I've learned a lot about the complexities of email development, client testing, and eventually come to develop my own templates and use the full power of Marketo's email editor in a way that's effective for both me and my users.
Sorry for the long rant, but I guess TLDR; this is a complex and nuanced subject with no single, perfect OOB solution for everyone, but there's resources out there to make it easier for a range of different needs.
(Particularly in regard to JS, not so much markup/CSS... though there are plenty of examples of the latter as well.)
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