I guess in the end it’s a mixture of existing solutions that yields best results but requires some amount of research:
- total downloads
- recent downloads (love that hex provides those)
- README - aka what is this package good at, API etc.
- is there a Changelog?
- when was the last release?
- how long has the package been around
- github stars
- open issues
- open PRs
- recent commit activity
- blog posts
- what do my friends use…
In the end no one can take the tough decision of what library to use of your hands and responsibility.
I think 3rd party websites can help with this, so while libhunt.com fails to sort the search correctly I think it’s a good step. I liked ruby-toolbox a lot but it is broken for some time now…
That is always the problem, someone has to maintain lists and whatever. A particular problem I have with a “committee” is who decides what gets in and who’s on that committee. For instance in Ruby land the most interesting stuff happening imo is rom-rb, hanami and trailblazer. For all I know, dhh probably doesn’t like them very much and I also heard that they’re not that well known/highly regarded in the U.S. I also think it’d be great if they’d take their talents to other languages (like… Elixir) but that might just be me 
I agree that rather than creating new stuff working together to improve existing libraries is preferable, it’s not always possible though. Sometimes project philosophies just diverge too much or a better solution to a problem requires a wholly different approach and it’s easier to implement something new than make a backwards incompatible release of library X (like lots of people said Angular2 should have had a new framework name).
Sometimes breaks are needed and a new thing needs to come up. Like shrine in ruby for instance. Also after evaluating all other benchmarking libraries I could find in Elixir I decided to make my own (a dormant PR and low test coverage among others later though). It’s hard to gain traction for new things though…
