Hallo!
well, as asiad in previous emails: the good thing about plone is, that it has a wiki. so people can do sophisticated stuff with it if they are willing to get into it, or just use simple things they already know.
I am also not such a fan of all the plone stuff but I don't think that changing to an other CMS would make sense ...
As for the downloads page, I am currently the maintainer and I really see no advantage to changing it. If you want to add the plone software center as an additional thing, that's fine by me.
[...]
the main problem with the downloads section is, however, that there is no place where people are allowed to put their packages. (though they can easily add their package to the enumeration, once they have found a place for it).
yes ... There should also be a place to download externals and patches and whatever ... (maybe also taken from the autobuilds as frank suggested some time ago ?)
Look e.g. at plone.org/products - there all the products (= externals/abstractions in pd world) are managed in a nice way ...
LG Georg