In reply to David Anderson.

You've pretty much described the situation to a tee David. WordPress used to be about improving the developers and users lives but it seems we've left that long behind. WordPress.org seems to worry more now about increasing marketshare and increasing the revenue of WordCamp gold sponsors (Yoast, Jetpack, Akismet, Automattic). Sad to think that ten thousand open source developers sacrificed their personal time for at least five years to create this situation (in the first five years of WordPress, most people worked for free on the project). The last five years most of the developers are "sponsored". The corporate developers have driven off many of the real pioneers. There's still lots of sacrificing our time as well as small agency owners giving up otherwise billable hours to contribute.

Could we please have back our much better tabbed plugin directory with stats and past versions and a proper review section with short summaries of the comments and not just star ratings? Sure, improve the typography if you want. Make the tabs prettier. Manage the white space better. But don't destroy the utility against the wish of the developers who build your product for free.

I don't think it's too much to ask. Alex Shiels, Konstantin Obenland, Samuel Sidler: despite repeated feedback, you've managed to ignore everything we told you. Outside of search (which is a win but missing advanced parameters for those who need them, Google manages to be simple yet deep at the same time, perhaps you could take some lessons from them) the new plugin directory is a huge step backwards.