I can share my experience with anyone if interested. I took a really long time to look at theme framework. In the end, I went with Theme Junkie as a friend (DividendNinja) highlighted it was easy to work with. I am a programmer although not in the web industry so I had some learnings to do but I ended up customizing the basic theme I started from.

To get what you want, you will probably require customization and need to spend some money.

I strongly recommend you outline what you want. I wanted

- Featured section to pin any posts I want

- Simple Heading with a location for ads

- Easy integration of advertisement where I want them (I have no plugins managing my ads)

- I wanted social sharing easily integrated (I added linked in myself)

- I wanted social follow easily integrated (I customize that - I wanted to free sidebar location from aweber form as it takes space and doesn't perform at all. popup and in page do much better)

- I have not focused on what the theme provides for SEO though. There are many plugins out there ...

After switching theme, I was able to remove a lot of plugins for a better performance of the site.

Mobile Responsive was not need I had. Mobile is really phone and tablets and most of my traffic is from tablets and the site works fine. I look at responsive themes and I simply did not like them. It doesn't do much for monetization either ...

Anyways, I thought I would share since many were discussing themes on a few threads. 

I am happy to have feedback if you have any 

Cheers!