In reply to Jeff Chandler.

I'm afraid that I'm with Jesse.

EDD has to be the worst plugin I know for releasing updates with a ton of bugs, which then have to be squashed by subsequent updates. It's got to the point where I deliberately stay several updates behind and wait for the updates-to-cure-the-updates. (All these newly-introduced bugs also mean that the rate of updates has become quite ridiculous.)

But that's not all. EDD doubled the price of extensions not so long ago, so the original prices for these passes came across as just plain greedy. I heard some call it extortionate. Which is particularly ironic, since I've seen Pippin accuse a reviewer on wordpress.org of engaging in "blackmail" and "extortion" simply for promising to come back and change his or her review if the problems s/he reported were rectified!

So, no, Pippin is no luxury: far from it. And the two things that keep EDD going are barely connected to anything new that it has provided over the last couple of years.

One is that, like WordPress itself, EDD's success has been based on a core that makes it relatively easy for others to create add-ons (particularly for payment gateways).

The other is that EDD currently faces little direct competition. (WooCommerce is about the closest to a competitor around, but the two products aren't really doing the same thing.) I can't help feeling that, if EDD were a forms plugin, it would be really struggling. It certainly needs to up its game, irrespective of the prices it currently charges.