First of all - thanks for all the answers and the discussion about this topic. It's great to hear that something like a extension-website is "in the making" and in my opinion it's a step in the right direction. I agree with Owen that the current situation with the extensions is some kind of chaotic and I don't think the right place for plugins & extensions is in the repositories of the different distributions.
About the gnome brand thing: In my opinion, the best way to "preventing" people from theming/hacking gnome-shell is a good default design - which gnome 3 (imho) certainly has! I'm not an inexperienced user and I like to change things like the wallpaper or the desktop theme from time to time. But with gnome 3, I always found myself changing these things back to the default settings after some time. The only permanent "visual" change I made in fact was using the elementary-iconset. ;) Anyways, I think it's just not possible to prevent people from theming their desktop environment. Gnome 3 is a free desktop and not few people (including myself) use it because of the freedom to change the things they want to. If you want people to use gnome 3, you'll need to respect that. There are some (functional) things that I want to change in order to work more productive with gnome 3 - for example the "places-menu"-extension to get faster to my nautilus favorites & removable devices or the "IconManager"-extensions which moves tray icons to the top panel. The extensions are a great way to achieve that. There are other examples that the concept with unofficial extensions can work pretty good, one I thought of was the forum software vbulletin.com. (I know you can't compare it to gnome but i will...) "Modifications" are also not officially supported there and are therefore listed on the external site vbulletin.org. Nevertheless there are many of them and some addons-features are even integrated from time to time in further versions of the official software. So I don't think that you should see extensions as a "threat" but as a chance & a place for experiments. Most people that use gnome 3 will use it by choice and won't try to "change everything" :). But they will be glad to find a central website where they can inform themselves about available extensions if they want to...
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