1. Download page: we are working on improving the download page.
great is there a discussion about this somewhere?
A first step patch was applied to the Project module to enable full categorization of projects (e.g., with multiple vocabularies), see http://drupal.org/node/32121. An issue and draft patch for the next steps - sorting by date and category as well as alphabetically - is at: http://drupal.org/node/33803 I've been working this week on a revised patch and should have it posted next week. Comments meantime would be welcome. And Kieran at CivicSpace Labs is organizing a 'card sort' approach to deciding how to classify existing modules and themes. There is also a proposal to implement (opt in) XML-RPC calls between Drupal installs and drupal.org, see issue at http://drupal.org/node/34108. I'm beginning work on this issue--other ideas and contributions very welcome.
From that issue:
Dries: "rather than using explicit rating where users have to submit a score by hand, I'd prefer to use automatic ratings. I envision some XML-RPC function that posts a list of one's modules to Drupal.org. Drupal.org uses that to update/compile ratings. A key advantage is that: (i) it needs no manual rating/interaction (no interface cruft) (ii) easy to make it temporal so that the ratings automatically adapt over time (iii) better matches the reality." ... We could also extend this to enable drupal installs to query drupal.org for newer versions of installed modules, recent bugfixes, newly released modules, etc., thus providing significant benefits to the installed base.