Martin Dougiamas

I totally get where you're coming from, and can see how developers would love to be able to insert anything they like into any part of the page. 

But clearly:

• that is at odds with pretty much every major interface around.  Quite a lot of the work I've seen designers focussing on even just in Moodle are about how to just present one simple chunk at a time.
• even if page chock-full of data and widgets is something people want, it would require a huge design process to make that kind of shift and prevent the overall UX becoming a mess for users

One of the design constraints was that plugin developers don't have to do ANYTHING special at all.  

And theme designers, well, just try and constrain them.    Anything Bootstrap 4 supports is fair game.

They look really wierd and confusing when you put them on ALL pages in an activity (or course, or user pages, ).  Doubly so on those with forms.  We tried it.  

The rule about this is:  the settings menu for a thing is always on the MAIN page of the thing.

The reason for keeping our plugins code internal to Moodle HQ is because I believe very strongly that a single official plugins database with reliable data and processes contributes to the strength of this project.    

You've made it very clear you want our code to set up an alternative Moodle plugins database.  Using the official code would make it look confusingly similar to the official one and I won't support that.   Other open source projects have experienced a lot of problems when multiple repositories are set up everywhere, with different versions of the same plugins in them etc.  I want to protect us from that outcome and maximise our combined efforts to keep quality high.

It's nothing to do with licenses.  Thousands of people don't distribute their modified versions of Moodle code, including your services company Remote Learner, and that is fine.  No one, least of all me as the overall copyright license holder, is saying they need to.

If anyone truly wants to help develop the official plugins database then get in touch with me directly.

"One of the goals at the beginning was to include features that are available in all of most popular themes."

Not really no.  Those exist and will continue to work.

The goals here were to implement bootstrap 4 and JS frameworks, implement some the popular conventions out beyond Moodle as it's been for 14 years, and start the convergence with the mobile interface. 

This one is not a simple theme though.  It's a new direction for themes.