In order to keep the plugins as project deps in package.json we need to sort out some details of treating plugins as npm packages first:
1) Plugins don't currently have package.json files, and list their deps in plugin.xml. 2) Are we ok with loosing the possibility of specifying platform specific dependencies? (e.g. plugin A might depend on plugin B for iOS and on nothing for Android) 3) Simply listing deps inside the newly created package.json in plugins will create a possibly deep tree of plugin/node_modules/plugin folders with possible duplicates. Npm's peer dependencies <http://blog.nodejs.org/2013/02/07/peer-dependencies/> might be the right solution, but I haven't looked at it yet. I agree that Cordova is a build system to a very large extent. But then it makes more sense to treat it as a tool to be used by other build systems rather than re-invent all the wheels on our own. Recently I tried building a cordova project with Gulp without using the CLI, it works great. https://github.com/kamrik/CordovaGulpTemplate Some time ago Carlos did a similar thing with Grunt: https://www.npmjs.org/package/grunt-cordovacli
