I agree with you. Rose by any other name would still be a rose. You are a hard-core developer, have your strong opinions, and Hype plugins are one of the greatest contributions to Elgg.

I think my audience or domain of asking this question probably does not include any Dev but someone like me/us who are a mixture of hobby, non-profit or little-bit ad oriented (personally I do Ad-less sites), people who know some php and css, people who download and use cms/framework etc like Drupal, WP, Elgg Joomla, people who are looking at Buddypress, Joomla-Easysocial, Oxwall, Humhub etc etc. If any Dev thinks in our shoes, its fine. The rise of Joomla-Easysocial as a paid option has arisen meteorically because it integrates everything into one stuff and has a great, easy, intuitive status-box or whatever you call it to post all relevant stuffs in one place.

" instead you create an event and then share it on the wall." it involves 2 steps or maybe even more. FB or Easysocial-Joomla does this or has the option to do this in one single step, easy and done! Everything is in a serial view in these walls, the easiness of which can be compared somewhat to Whatspp. I personally, like you, may prefer what you have said you preferred because in my core I am little geeky too .... but the trillions of users are not preferring the way I or you do. FB rules in this sector. I do hate FB and particularly its monopoly and I wished ELLO with its clean, sparkling brilliance or the new G+ gave FB some fight. But that seems not to be happening anytime soon.

Here what I am thinking is NOT what I prefer but something ... some system, be it Elgg pwered or something else snatch away the monopoly from FB. That is, if still 14 to 15 years olds of today dream of downloading some CMS/Framework and have their own site like we used to download Drupal, Wordpress etc. To that end, we need a comparison to see what is missing, what is really missing as a mass-used component irrespective of its name. Thanks if anybody's interest is aroused!

[Moderator: this comment was off-topic. It was moved to its own topic. Read it here.]

Being a complete noob to Ellg you will have to forgive me until I put the salt in my salty seadev legs.

The plugin page for a noob doesn't relay a good first impression. There is so much historical stuff in there, that firstly its quite hard to navigate and the most downloaded and most recommended are floating on much that is redundant.
There is a facebook theme that looks really good but then you realise it hasn't had any updates or devwork for several years.
hypeWall looks like the plugin to solve much in this respect and I am hoping it will be rocking n rolling for 2.0.

As a noob I just thought why not add a fourth column of editors picks that somebody from the community gives a quickstart best-of.

Also there are other business models that can be employed that provide a bigger carrot and larger rewards to contributors. My comment was moved to its own topic https://elgg.org/discussion/view/2404698/has-anyone-thought-about-employing-a-different-business-model-than-the-one-currently-available    
That is just something I have wondered in general and just a suggestion.

I am moving from Oxwall to Ellg as Oxwall is great and does look and feel more polished, but when you start developing plugins, the further you go, the more vague the framework would seem to be.
Its still very early days for me but the documentation and community looks much better here.
It feels more like "true" opensource, but my noob status is probably naive and infuriating but I will try my best to improve.