Unpublishing a Scholar Site changes its theme to default

I was trying to customize the opensholar front page by selecting only few sites to be visible. For this I added a filter to the front page view to display only published Scholar Sites. When I unpublished a site from Content, my purpose was done, but I observed a side effect: the unpublished site loses its theme chosen by the user and goes back to default.

I have tested with multiple sites with same result, and hence, can conclude it's a bug. Any workaround for this? Or any other way to accomplish what I was trying to do (I am aware of the feature flag in front page view, but it just changes the ordering of list of sites, does not make them invisible)?