The new designs are great. I will say that more filters would be amazing! Replacing 'popular' with a dropdown I feel is a good call. By being able to select a star rating, I think this places more value on what is popular because honestly, there are some great plugins with 4 star ratings. As well, newer plugins might have gotten some lower ratings at first where active development on the plugin could have changed the outlook across the board.

In terms of the design, I like the blue bar instead of the white bar that is currently present. It feels more like the WordPress backend :)

All in all, the direction is great. The meta is already there so I would assume that the implementation would be rather unobtrusive.