Flexibility is not always desirable. Andrey's idea enables easy deinstallation of plugins. To install a plugin, you unzip it to 3rdparty folder, to uninstall it you just drop the relevant folder.
>From my point of view, "just unzip" kind of installation rocks if compared with "create new folder, unzip, modify properties, remember to keep those in sync when upgrading, etc, etc" Of course, you can mention each new plugin in the specified properties, however that does not scale well, taking into account that major number of users have absolutely no idea what the classpath is and how user.classpath is different from plugin_dependency_paths. Seriously. Am I missing something? Vladimir