In reply to Jeff Chandler.

I know, as Nick noted above, that contributors put a lot of work and heart into this stuff, but I still just don't really understand this idea. If we do want to improve the plugin interface, It seems like there are so many better ways to help people find plugins.

The main challenge right now is that there are *so many* plugins to sift through for any given type of functionality, and there is no efficient way to do so, either via the dashboard plugin interface or on WordPress.org. I think that's the real crux of the problem. To solve it, you need to give users the power to filter plugins based on the criteria they care about.

Instead, this mostly offers up a random collection of plugins, that may or may not be relevant to what the user wants/needs, and which is based on criteria/biases the algorithm developers - rather than any given user - care about.

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Does anyone have idea what specific criteria are being used to generate these lists?