An important point is that even if the plugin is completely robust, it probably contains a huge amount of code/options that you personally will never need or use, so while finding something for proof of concept is easy, finding production practical plugins are hard.
An example for me was that we needed something that would float buttons in certain positions depending on user input, so the obvious solution was to get a plugin that did tooltips and change the graphics to hide everything but a button. Worked like a charm and not a single error on any browser or mobile device. The problem was it was nearly 75k all in. This is no criticism of the author, he did an amazing job of being as broadly adopted as possible by giving every option everyone had asked for and more. Obviously though I only need 1 set of those options out of the hundreds he'd had squeezed into his code.
Before we went live I decided to find time over a weekend to rewrite and got it just as stable and robust for under 6k. Clearly as a one off this is could be considered a minor issue but with times that by 5 plugins and you start having an unpleasant experience for people.
I think what you have highlighted is really a general problem with a lot of freely available software and that is the authors set out to solve a problem that they have, release it to the public and then get deluged with feature requests, which being nice people, they duly implement. Before anyone knows what has hit them, the little solution has become a big bloated piece of crap that is too large to use.
I've released a number of WordPress themes and I always get requests like "put in an option so the menu can be on the left or the right", "make it so I can pick any font from Google fonts using just a dropdown in the theme options" and many other wacky requests. I find myself having to draw a line between useful requests that everyone will benefit from and crazy edge cases that just serve one or two people but will destroy the elegance of my original vision. It's hard saying no to people, but it has to be done.
An example for me was that we needed something that would float buttons in certain positions depending on user input, so the obvious solution was to get a plugin that did tooltips and change the graphics to hide everything but a button. Worked like a charm and not a single error on any browser or mobile device. The problem was it was nearly 75k all in. This is no criticism of the author, he did an amazing job of being as broadly adopted as possible by giving every option everyone had asked for and more. Obviously though I only need 1 set of those options out of the hundreds he'd had squeezed into his code.
Before we went live I decided to find time over a weekend to rewrite and got it just as stable and robust for under 6k. Clearly as a one off this is could be considered a minor issue but with times that by 5 plugins and you start having an unpleasant experience for people.