I definitely understand the issues that the Stream team is trying to tackle. We encounter them ourselves with our own product. There is functionality that we simply can't provide the way we'd like to provide it because of the shortcomings of being a downloadable plugin with no control over the server environment in which it is executed.

The irony here is a lot of enterprise customers want functionality and performance that won't necessarily be possible in a standalone plugin designed for a MySQL database environment. Especially when it comes to things like analytics, logging, etc.

I think it's a great move for Stream and ultimately will make the product far better for all kinds of customers, but especially enterprise customers which typically have more demanding needs and more traffic. Even if some don't quite grasp that now.