As a plugin developer, I'm a fan of keeping the core as lightweight as possible -- and having plugins for the nice-to-have features (e.g. Code Editor).

I'm not a huge fan of the canonical plugins idea, at least the way it's been presented thus far. A bundled/canonical plugin would have tremendous outreach, but Carl is right -- providing support for a canonical plugin could prove overwhelming for the plugin developers as well as the WP core team.

@Keith - Agreed. I think it would be of WP's best interest to steer clear of favoritism.

Improvements to the WP.org plugins page and "Add New" area (within WordPress itself) could make a world of difference. They're now collecting "Plugin Compatiblity" crowdsourcing data, which could be combined with WP.org's metric shit-ton of other statistics data to determine which plugins to feature.

My recommendation would be for WP to re-vamp the plugins page to take all their statistics (average downloads/day, plugin age, last updated, rating, compatibility, tags) and use it to provide a more interactive/filterable experience.

An obvious example is to allow users to search for plugins tagged with X that are compatible with Y version of WordPress. Or, plugins rated >= 75% with >= 5 votes.

Also, cleaning up the tags system would make them more helpful. Maybe even going as far as only using tags for aspects of WordPress (e.g. "Admin UI", "Widgets", "Image Management", "Search", "SEO", etc).

Finally, instead of just having a single "Featured Plugins" area, maybe having a tabbed area of high-impact categories (UI, SEO, Post Types, Forms, Images, Commenting, Roles), with several algorithm-picked plugins under each type. That'll give users a much wider view of the variety of WP plugins (no offense to PollDaddy, IntenseDebate, and the others).