In reply to Rarst.

Agreed. I believe it would be far more profitable for Automattic to work towards further incentivizing their contribution programs rather than bashing those that “don’t make the cut”.

For example, why not roll out an official and universal commercial plugin licensing/subscription service that directly supports WordPress development? Further, this could be restricted to those who actively contribute back to the core. This is something like what’s happening with Woocommerce extensions and WordPress.com plugins, but why not roll it out to all WordPress users? This could really help to simplify the tangled mess of commercial plugin distribution, and help to further sustain the WordPress.org open source project.