Lots of good notes here. But am I following you in that you are talking about compiling the plugins before hand? I was thinking about the core application being distributed as a binary release while plugins might be source-based. Then again, that causes potential trouble with plugin dependencies I guess. Just a bit more work to either offer compilation for plugin creators or making them build for multiple architectures. In that sense source and compiling at run time felt promising. Assuming those facilities are there in a release.
