Simplifying the Laravel ecosystem - what are your views?

[Sophist-UK]

@taylorotwell has a philosophy of limiting the addition of new functionality in order to keep the core codebase to a maintainable level, and (for what my personal opinion is worth i.e. nothing) that is a philosophy that I support in the main. This is mitigated to a great extent because Laravel includes many ways that allow people to extend its functionality in a fairly seamless way (sub-classing, traits, macros, scopes, attributes etc.), but it does lead to a proliferation of 3rd party extensions, and this has some downsides when you are searching for a solution...

a. Choice - often there are multiple extensions that suggest that they will solve your problem, so which do you choose? The one with the most download? The most recently updated?
b. Quality - even though the readme may suggest that an extension solves your needs, often the only way to find out whether it works in your own use case is to try it out which can be very time consuming. And the documentation can also be minimal or variable.
c. Support - if you find something needs fixing, how good will the support be right now? Will the author fix it? If you fix it, will the author merge the PR you submit?
d. Longevity - will the extension you choose continue to be supported for the lifetime of the system you are developing? Of course, being open source, you can always fork the extension and create a new version that you support yourself, but that just makes the situation that tiny bit worse than it was originally because now there is yet another extension and you are now personally responsible for supporting not only yourself but anyone else who uses it.

So, this discussion is intended to solicit your own views / opinions along two lines of thinking...

1. What functionality should be added to core Laravel because the functionality itself is reasonably core, and because extensions providing it are so commonly used?

2. Is there a way of simplifying the extensions ecosystem and solving many of the above issues by e.g. having a community supported set of non-duplicated extensions that would eliminate most of the above issues?

[Sophist-UK]

What functionality should (in your opinion) be added to core Laravel?

(... rather than be provided by extensions?)

[Sophist-UK]

What do you think about a community-maintained collection of "core" extensions?