In reply to Steve Wilkinson.

Steve, the developer gain nothing at all from having his plugin on the repository. The graph actually shows the current disinterest developers have in the repository, as with half the plugins being obsolete you would expect that there will be a lot of forking and therefor more new plugins, but this year is going to be maybe just a little better then flat.

The disinterset probably come also from higher barrier to entry than on github, but also from competition from code canyon. Why would anyone submit a plugin to the repository where he will do no money while at codecanyon he can at least have the illusion he will.

As for comments.... this is part of the big discussion on how core developers became disconnected from all wordpress users, with 4.4 having no feature at all for the blogger or SMB. REST API, oEmbed, srcset are features that maybe big organizations want but no one else (having them is a "nice to have" but is not a reason to upgrade).