@Kevin Muldoon - To be clear, WPTavern was added long before it was purchased by Matt. I was just as shocked as anyone to discover one day that my little WordPress centric site had reached the ranks of Weblogtoolscollection.com. I think you make a good point about WLTC and their theme and plugin posts but believe it or not, those were the posts people kept coming back for and expected to see on a routine basis. Collectively, they brought in the most traffic. They didn't need to be reviewed they only needed exposure so that people knew they existed. Everyone is always looking for that next free, cool looking WordPress theme. I can honestly say that some of the best WordPress content I have ever published was during my time writing for WLTC in December of 2007 through 2008.

As for the dashboard feed, I can understand your gripes, especially as a WordPress centric site author. At this point, I wouldn't mind seeing the Other WordPress News dashboard widget disappear so all that was left was the official WordPress Development blog. This way, I wouldn't feel so bad about cluttering up so many dashboards.

On the other hand, I think it would be cool if WPTavern generated so much traffic, that I could push that traffic to other people in the community like the Digg effect. I hope as the site continues to grow and the community around the site strengthens, I'll be able to do that.

As for the big discussion, most of what you have pointed out is stuff that has been discussed before. However, I'd have to do some research to see how the Featured Plugins area is calculated. It would be nice to see a variety of plugins in those spots every day, or every week.