We talk a lot about data portability, but both Chip and Syed hit on some points that are truly at the heart of this for me. On the one hand, it's about the users. On the other, it's about designers having the tools they need at hand for creating cool themes.

At some point in the past few years, theme designers also became plugin developers, mostly because we wanted to build themes that were beyond the standard blog design. So, instead of focusing efforts on actual design, more focus was put on development of features. This shifted the market toward big theme packages. Even though much of the code was open source, it started a dangerous trend toward a closed-source system where everyone had their own scripts that varied wildly. I don't want to get into the economics of it all, but a lot of extremely good designers couldn't compete with features.

What I don't want to see is a trend of everyone having their own plugin with their own branding. While I think competition is good, we need collaboration around a central project. If we have too many in-house plugins developed, it weakens the concept that many of us have been preaching.

My ultimate goal is to see growing communities around specific plugins for things like forums (bbPress), e-commerce (Jigoshop, WooCommerce), portfolios, restaurants, and much more. When we have a major plugin or two to handle specific uses, it allows for much more innovation in the theme space. Theme designers can quit worrying about plugin dev and start designing awesome stuff.