Use EDD and AffiliateWP and highly recommend them.

"AffiliateWP’s success is an example of what’s possible in the WordPress product space with hard work, high quality code, and the right team"

Although I 100% agree with this last sentence, I think the fourth and most important aspect is "working smart". What's the old expression... "Work smarter, not harder"?

"Working smart" is a broad brush, but you can see it in all Pippin's success. For AffiliateWP, that has been things like putting it on GitHub and other smart marketing.

But for every AffiliateWPs there's 50 PluginXs that are hardly used, even though the devs work hard and write solid code. (Usually they're a team of one.)

Pippin is a great and inspiring role model for WP devs, and we would all do well, like he has, to get smarter.

Maybe if we asked ourselves each morning "What can I do today that's smart?"