Credit where it’s due!
This week I’ve been working through a batch of small improvements to my forum: layout, tags, automation, and general tidying up. Some of that work required pulling additional data from the site, so I needed to enable a few plugins, Data Explorer among them.
What struck me is that because these plugins were already pre-installed, enabling them was just a matter of flipping them from disabled to enabled. I did this three separate times over the last two days, each time in the middle of the day on a live site. If they hadn’t been bundled, every one of those would have meant running a full rebuild just to add the plugin, all while the site was in active use.
I’ve posted before about not loving bloat, and I stand by that in general. But I’d also never want to rebuild Discourse every single time I want to make a minor improvement. 
The list of bundled plugins is long, but it’s clearly well thought out. It’s the popular, genuinely useful ones that are included.
I tend to speak up when I run into a problem with something, so I wanted to balance that out and give credit here.
The Discourse team showed real foresight in understanding what production looks like, especially for self-hosted instances. Having these plugins pre-installed means you’re not forced to disrupt a live site just to start using them. That’s a small design decision that saves real headaches.
Thank you, for thinking it through! 