In reply to Justin Tadlock.

The theme directory was a ground-up rebuild. The goal there was not to add new functionality, but simply to move everything to a more modern system. It now runs in WordPress, not in an old version of bbPress. Adding new features like, say, multi-author support and readme's, is something we'll add on later, once the system is stable and I'm not committing bugfixes every other day. :)

The plugin directory is basically a re-skin. It's still running the same old code behind the scenes. Just with a new theme for it and some minor improvements here and there. Big changes will wait until we're at the state where we're satisfied with the theme-directory code and can use that experience gained to rebuild it too.

You need to understand that there is always a push to make things "look better" because people like change and new and different are generally considered good. Making the theme directory look like the themes browser in core created the push to make the plugin directory look like core as well. So on that level, the plugin directory needed to get this change in order to keep up and help us find what works, what doesn't, what needs to be altered, etc.

But at the same time, making deep functional changes is difficult because these are tightly integrated systems with lots of inter-dependencies. The themes directory talks to the API system to hand out theme updates to installations, it talks to trac for the review team, it talks to the profiles pages for showing themes made by users.. All these have to be accounted for, so making backend changes like this is difficult and takes time. Reskinning takes less time, but doesn't produce any path forward for underlying functionality improvements.

Everything is a work-in-progress, always. Profiles were updated today to show new information from the new themes directory and the new ratings system. The API got a change to make the featured themes rotate in a more sane way. We're continually watching how people use the system and making adjustments based on that, while at the same time trying to improve the back-end and add new functionality that people need and which will help our users use the site in better and improved ways.

But all changes take time, and sometimes we'll change things in ways that some people don't agree with. That's fine, we don't expect everybody to agree with everything. But that doesn't mean we're going to stop working on what we think will make things better in the long term. :)