Hi @stepheybaker,
We work really hard to make The Events Calendar as flexible and visually attractive as we can: in fact, we like to think that the layouts and styling decisions embedded within the plugin are just opinionated enough to achieve exactly that, while still meshing nicely with most well-written themes.
Given that, we’re sorry to hear The Events Calendar didn’t meet your expectations. I’d like to think though, that for most customers, an aesthetically pleasing calendar is indeed what they get straight out of the box. Here’s a link to the main calendar view on our demo site, as an example:
wpshindig.com/events
We’re running a minimally-modified default WordPress theme there, so this ought to be close to what most users see. Additionally, thinking of your note about it being hard to add a header or other content around the calendar, we do provide things like the “Add HTML Before/After Calendar” setting (described here) and solid integration with the WordPress theme customizer (described here).
I’m not sure about the specific challenges you faced in the context of your site (and the particular mix of themes and plugins you were using) or what more we could have done to support you—best I can tell, I don’t think you reached out in the community forums before posting this review—but if you do have an opportunity to take our calendar for a spin in the future, and want to provide some more specifics about any challenges you are facing, then perhaps we or other members of the community will be able to assist.
Though we’re sorry you feel your time was wasted, thank you for giving us a try and taking a moment to share this feedback.
