@Dominic I think we actually agree on a lot of points, or at the very least on the goals. My main ask is simply to not rush this.

My thread on plugins is mostly me thinking out aloud while exploring the design space. I still don't feel like I have a full grasp on a lot of the details. My mode of operation is to figure out the most general way of doing things, and then use that as a foundation for making decisions - which will certainly involve restricting the scope. So I guess I'm asking you to humor my explorations, knowing that I am open to reduce the ambition of the current drafts.

This approach may lead to the same result - sandboxed, local plugins that declaratively specify their api with constraints enforced by the server - but I want to fully understand how to reach those conclusions, and what the alternatives are. You clearly thought about these things longer and much deeper than me, cryptix and keks did, but we can't look into your head.

To give a vague, mathematical analogy: I'm trying to find linearly independent vectors that span our whole problem space, before settling on a set that only spans part of the problem space. Because who knows - maybe there's a really sweet spot outside of what a more constrained approach can find.