The plugin discovery process would improve if the string search process were more liberal with results so that searching under "db manager" would actually find "wp db manager" (which it doesn't). Also, since there are already download metrics for each plugin, it would be cool to mashup download metrics with an associative algorithm that would produce search results similar to "users also tried these plugins" or "plugins with similar features". As it is now, the search process is purely alphabetical within the plugin admin, but associative on WordPress.org. Why not combine the two within the admin? (I'm not a top tier developer, so I have no idea what the ramifications of these suggestions might be).