...There was a discussion a few months ago about the need for a blocks.cocoondev.org alike site, maybe this is relevant again now? By default you would allow all blocks into an incubation phase and do a vote on the ones to absorb in the cocoon dist.
I think what would help the most is an easy way to integrate "external blocks" into Cocoon when building it.
If you look at the installation docs of the Fins block for example (http://www.sidimar.ipzs.it/fins011/docs/install.html), this is way too complicated. Nothing against Fins but it shows that integrating blocks which are not in CVS is a currently..suboptimal.
I don't think it would be very hard to make the blocks system more configurable, so that external blocks would need only an XML descriptor to be integrated at compile-time. But someone has to do it.
Of course, Real Blocks will solve this but no one knows when.
-Bertrand
