I wonder why it's a curated list then. If the pull is that the blogging tools are really nice then it seems counter intuitive to not allow people to pay some money to use it, and instead require them to be this cool to ride the svbtle-coaster.
(the style of those blogs as a reader is OK, I've seen better and I've seen worse. If a blog has good content but is hard to read there are plenty of ways of fixing it, so design is not a big deal).
They get a UI which is custom-designed to focus on writing and little else. Dustin Curtis explains it here - http://dcurt.is/codename-svbtle