If the 3rd party Elgg plugins wouldn't have been published here on the community site I'm pretty sure that the Elgg framework would have been much less used and maybe it would be already dead by now. But the fact that Elgg has survived up to now is no guarantee that it will continue to be used forever. With new versions of Elgg coming out and plugins available here on the site no longer compatible (e.g. with Elgg 1.8) but more and more upgrades of existing plugins and new plugins only available on github the popularity of Elgg will rather decrease than increase.

From the point of view of someone who's new to Elgg: do you really think he will know where to look at github for plugins? Or wouldn't he rather give up on Elgg thinking there are not that many plugins (and maybe some specific plugins needed) available?

I wouldn't say that all plugins would need to be published here on the community site. But what about seeing the community site as "showroom" of your work? And even if you don't want to provide new features for free what's the difference of providing them for download at a prominent place if you already offer them anyway on github for free. Maybe some users will ask for adding some features - but what's the damage in declining this work if they don't want to pay for it? Also you might get some useful feedback and bugreports (for free). And you might even get some new paying customers who trust on your capabilities based on the plugins they were able to try.

I am just looking for an elgg plugin, from this elgg comunity site, that will completely disable/remove the 'friend' functionality.

If that does not exisit then I am stuck with this unwanted feature.

I am not trying to discuss the validty of plugins found on elgg community vs those on github vs some other place

+1 We have the same requirenment in our current project: To disable friends functionality.

Plugins sidenote: As someone new to Elgg I found the Elgg plugin area not really good to use. If your interested in the discussion it's probably best to open a new thread. http://plugins.jquery.com/ might come as an inspiration here.

I agree, however when I point out a perfectly working version it's very silly to refuse to use it simply because it's only available on github.  I can't force people to release things here :)

With regard to the plugin area - we're aware, the whole community site is getting an overhaul for usability - as with anything though, this is a bit of a moving target with ad-hoc progress.