A post to the forums and a followup post to this list - with an additional forum post - have brought the issue of Kubrick and K2 support to the fore. The situation has been found wanting and change is needed from us.

I have installed K2, had a poke around and have also spoken to Chris Davis about the issues surrounding this whole thing.

Firstly I will say that I am guilty of referring help for both Kubrick and K2 out of the forums in the past. The reason are varied but I have. I do support seeking help where it is most appropriate to find it.

Secondly: Having installed and had a look inside K2 it is nowhere near as complex as I had thought it would be. I'm sure there is more going on 'under the hood' than I will understand but the same is true of numerous plugins and maybe even themes - and I will answer anything that I can on the forums with those (I support WP but can't write php...)

An important factor though is that of the right support. Historic reasons aside there is a wealth of knowledge in the K2 support forums - and a corresponding lack in the WP forums. This is not a fault, it's just the way it is - and if we are to support WordPress users we must address this to benefit them. A theme isn't for life but a bad experience when seeking support will be remembered for a while - not what we aim for.
The other thing we need to remember is perspective - just because we start supporting K2 does not mean that we will get a flood of questions.

So the way forward is this:
Regardless of the theme, we answer if we know. If we do not then we _suggest_ alternate sources.
What we cannot do is see 'K2' (or the name of any other theme) and do a blanket "not here" response. There are increasing themes that use plugins as part of their base (K2 does not) and the code hooks being built in by the devs mean that more themes will happen along that have more features built in. Several exist right now but we do not treat them like K2.
We have tags - we can encourage theme authors to subscribe to their tag feed and this not only means they can see the posts/problems but also that we can see the help given and we can learn from that. Isn't that how a lot of us learned anyway?
There will be questions that we cannot answer but we should be sure that this is the case before we point them to the k2 forums.

In the end though we are here for the people who use WordPress. They know nothing of the who, why and where - they just have a problem and will be grateful for an answer.