WordPress Wants To Be An Epic Wasteland

Somehow at the moment I’ve ended up being responsible for building three different websites in WordPress. While it’s a little overwhelming to keep track of all three projects on top of my normal workload I’m actually coming to like the CMS quite a bit. I do have one bone to pick with WP though. There seems to be a trend in every theme I’ve encountered so far. That is that the elements on the page have to be at least two inches apart. It’s like the folks who design these all have some agreement that they’re going to try and create a new design rule that no website will ever again be compactly, and neatly laid out on the page. Don’t get me wrong, spacing is important. It’s important to make sure your viewer/reader can easily scan the page and take in information without being overwhelmed. That being said it’s also important that your reader/viewer not get lost between the body column and the sidebar on your page. Or any two adjacent elements as WP theme designers seem to want to happen. Does anyone know why this is? Why in the world do I need 200 pixels between my top navigation my page content. Or worse 150 pixels between two paragraphs in the same post?