I hear what you are saying, and agree that establishing a solid foundation
(whatever term we use for it) is crucial to our success. Where I believe
we differ in viewpoint is on the scope issue.
There are many good infrastructure projects that ultimately never get
uptake or traction because people cannot "make the leap" to understand the
value they bring. It is very difficult to sell infrastructure, and I base
that experience on a core funded project that took over 5 years to get any
reasonable traction (and only did so when it was reframed as a business
value).
The plugin/extension points that you assert would be out of scope are
precisely those value propositions that can excite the industry. I think
we'd be remiss in working on them.
That said, so long as we keep them clearly extensions, the opportunities
are still there to add value and create vendor opportunity.