Yes, Tim is correct about the fundamental issue. But managing expectations is actually not that difficult… you only need to tell people what to expect. The problem is that no-one appears to know.
To me, CP consists of a bunch of random people doing random jobs in a random manner. There is no coherent plan of action, no goals, no timeline, no priorities. It is littered with projects that are half-finished, stalled, forgotten or abandoned. Maybe this is typical for open source projects… I don’t know, it’s my first experience. But I can certainly understand why people get disheartened, lose interest and leave.
And please don’t point to the “roadmap” as if it has any answers. It’s not a roadmap. A roadmap is something you can use to plan a journey from A to B. ClassicPress only has a wishlist. It mentions some vague goals in a vague order and basically says: “We hope these will happen some day”.
The result is that contributors work in a sporadic way and have no idea whether their input is important, or somewhat useful or a total waste of time. That’s how I feel now - I spent a lot of time working on something that I thought was a significant contribution, but maybe I was just wasting my time. Who knows?
By the way, I think the plugins under discussion were never in the directory, nor were they on GitHub. They were made available to CP users via a private website.