There's a lot to like here, though I'm still troubled by the directory submission rules that are fairly stringently not allowing for any sort of promotional link or defined up-sell of any kind so as not to "disrupt the flow".

More often than not these days, people don't have as much free time to invest in coding just for the fun of it. I speak mainly of myself, but I have the notion that while WordPress is still grounded pretty firmly in Open Source (not a bad thing), it's been the open markets that have allowed it to grow as much as it has. I don't think it's wrong to allow people the opportunity (within reason) to make something back off their hard work should they choose. Donations are non-viable in my experience as the vast majority of humanity are way cheaper than they would like to admit.

Nowadays, the digital arms race of features means fewer and fewer pure open source approaches for plugins make sense and freemium is a new norm even if it's treated like a dirty word.

Without any sort of up-sell channel (rule-defined or element defined in blocks), we aren't going to see the plethora that we are hoping for, nor in some cases the quality that could be brought in by people working professionally on a block plugin. The time to define these up-sell and link options is right now.

Reading through some of the comments on the Make announcement and I was struck by a sort of quiet hypocrisy: This is all Open Source, but people are only allowed to do things so far as WE allow them.

Where WordPress started and where it is now are two separate points in time. I hope the Open Source community and the marketplaces can find a way to co-exist here in order to really rev up the platform for the future.