Not following the rules here but I think the weakness of WordPress.org—as described above—is one of the stronger links in the WordPress community. If almost everything were centralized on WordPress.org our community would be about as exciting and vibrant as the Drupal community. (Sorry, Drupal community, Drupal's awesome but the instructional community-vibe doesn't compare)

In Drupal-land almost everything is centralized on 1 central site and it's terrible finding trying to find tips, tricks, hacks, and recipes. I'm not talking about documentation for tags and code. I'm talking about the stuff you really need to build your site: instruction on cool things you can do with that code. Over here in WordPress-land there's an 'economic' incentive for providing solutions to WordPress problems on your site (you know, blogging about WordPress): you get traffic. Traffic leads to a whole host of other things that I won't get into here but you won't get the same thing out of building up a profile on WordPress.org. Which isn't to say one shouldn't build up a profile there by contributing. That's great. But if that's it, if that's all there is to the WordPress community we'll all lose far more than we gain. Centralize and official-ize everything and fewer people will contribute to the wider and wilder community of WordPress instruction.

Anyway, back to the game: A simpler API for things like installation profiles and theme options and the like. It's beyond my ability to contribute code towards this but I'll continue to talk, blog and tweet about it. I think this could give some much-needed confidence to designers who could in turn turnaround with some really neat, rock-solid, WordPress stuff.