[Hedda]

well, our addon reviewers have to do the entire review process for any submitted addon update, and having to do it only because one adds a youtube link to the addon.xml doesn't sound great to me, given that it's all done in sparetime and that this time is better spent on "real" updates.

Also, decoupling secondary metadata from the files might not be a bad idea in general (also for stuff like forum links etc). And if nobody would ever voice against hacks, nobody would take the lead and finally do it properly. Thing is, doing it properly is more work, but this only once, because once it's done properly more and more additions can be made much more easily. So in summary you should even save time.

OK I understand, very good points.

The wiki is a nice idea, but it would fragment the data too much for my liking , thats a seperate mysql db

My ultimate idea is to have simple appstore type frontend that shows all the add-ons in a friendly way over the web.

If apple/mozilla/google/steam can do it in one place, then so can we

So how about making the existing addons on Add-On website be editable via the web like a wiki by addon developers (plus selected mods and admins), similar to how items on sites TheTVDVB, TheMovieDB, and TheMusicDB can be modified via the web if you have a registered account with the correct user access rights.

Then make the Add-On Website have an API that Kodi can scrape for that metadata with scrapers, just as it does with any other metadata site that it scrapes.

That would decouple such secondary metadata, however like Martijn points out, that means that Kodi would have store that new metadata in a database, but you would probably just add attentional tables to the addons database.

That is, make Lodi have at least one official addon scraper that scrapes http://addons.xbmc.org

Just like for other scrapers make it be extendable so that others (like example ) can add additional scrapers if they, like example for http://addons.totalxbmc.tv