This usually turns into a popularity contest, which eventually reflects the same information as #downloads. imho, absolute numbers have little meaning: importance of a module is a factor of it's
1) usefulness 2) code quality (lack of bugs, buggy modules = bad reputation for drupal) 3) maintenance quality (support in future drupal versions?)
while (1) can be gauged from #downloads / popularity, the latter 2 can (possibly) be estimated from project.module stats.
Actually, I wouldn't mind having a small paragraph giving devel statistics for each module, like
#open confirmed bugs #critical bugs in the past month (open / solved) #feature requests handled #commits in the last 4 months
I disagree that rating and download numbers will result in similar values. There are large number of modules I've downloaded that I would rate poorly in several of those categories -- the fact that I've *investigated* something should not be taken as an indication of my *conclusion* about it. While extrapolaying from project.module could be useful, I'm not sure that it would result in any more accuracy. It also opens up a lot of arguments about what 'the right metric' is, when we could simply open up some basic voting/rating capabilities and depend on the community to do the work. It could easily penalize popular modules that churn through a lot of bugs and fixes while making little-used modules appear more stable even though they aren't. Again, I don't want to press for using *my* solution to this, I just think that pure download stats and issue tracker/commit stats won't result in the information that Joe User wants to see when he's skimming over the module list. --Jeff