About updater… I don’t really do that update manager thingy, I don’t like the idea.
Mainly because I don’t want to admin yet another website/server (I admin more than 20 of those, so each and every add-on server or site is a pain that I want to avoid, specially if it could affect other sites) and security concerns.
I also had (still have) my own updater system but I don’t ship it anymore in plugins/themes because of the security issue it implies.
Let’s assume my VPS on which I would have said repo gets hacked, and “evil” realises what it is used for, they just need to upload a poisoned file and increase version, the thing is then potentially on all sites using the plugin or theme. Which might be none, or hundreds, thousands (in my dreams)
I don’t like this idea, at all. This is why WP has WP Repo (for wp plugins) and we should have our own centrally managed server/update mech which gets monitored etc, or directly pulls from git.
Usually I just push to WP, but the problem with this plugin is that I can hardly mask it as a WP Plugin like I do with my other ones… so pushing it to WP repo will be tricky or impossible 
Also, I am not sure about this, aren’t the CP “research” plugins supposed to be somewhat “core” plugins?
I am happy to add it to my instance of the directory once we are happy with it, however… since you authored it I think the honours should be yours?
We anyway need to pep up our directory to also allow for “contributors” to show up there, not everything is a one-person-show
I will fiddle a bit more with the code later next week, maybe until then we have a taker who is willing to provide a update mech too.