I have to agree, new wordpress developers are being killed by this new alghoritm… Even if I understand that a plugin with 5k installation is something that the visitor must notice, there are obviously more recent plugins that are doing a better job (better UI for example, same functionalities). You run the risk to drive new WP users to “old” plugins, while the modern ones will stay in the shadow forever, because this is what the new search does. If you search for the EXACT name of some plugins and/or the EXACT list of their tags, they end up in 5th page or even worse. Are we sure this makes much sense?