Originally Posted by timmerino
I should also state that I am not a complete outsider. I am a WoW player and an AddOn user, but I did not know that so few AddOn developers create the majority of AddOns which are currently in use (although this isn't entirely surprising). Along these same lines, it's interesting that you say that the "golden age" of addons has passed. How and why do you think this eventuality came about?
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WoW allows us to use Lua as a programming language to do whatever we wish in WoW. However, Lua in itself isn't useful unless we are able to use it to interact with the WoW interface, and this is provided to us in the form of APIs that we can call. These APIs impose limits on what we can do, what actions are allowable, what is possible, what isn't possible.
Before patch 2.0 (TBC), addons had a much wider freedom of possibilities, including the possibility of canceling spells in midcast, moving the player automatically (so if you have enough waypoints and data on terrain, you can auto-walk between 2 locations in WoW), intelligently choose which spell to cast, and much more. As authors push the limits of the WoW system, Blizzard adds restrictions to counteract undesirable addon behavior to the game.
However, the game is still growing then, with subscribers still multiplying (
http://www.mmogchart.com/ - See charts link on the side, and the FAQ/Analysis if you're interested), so there's still a lot of possibilities to explore within addon development. There hasn't really been a game before this where the user interface is SO MODDABLE, letting users script and right the exact behavior they wish with a fully featured programing language (minus the OS library), with Blizzard's unofficial support and thru Slouken - Blizzard's UI programmer. Blizzard wanted to see what the community could do and if anything undesirable occurred, they can always ban the addon and break its functionality.
When Blizzard added the ability for addons to track CPU usage of each addon, vast addon programming paradigms occurred, shifted from writing addons in general, to writing GOOD and EFFICIENT addons. A lot of experimentation was done to determine how you could do X using the least amount of CPU time or memory, how addons could share resources and resulted in the creation of many of the wow addon libraries you see today.
During TBC, the UI saw various improvements, and major changes, particularly when they revamped the combat log system so that it is far more addon friendly (i.e we don't have to parse English (and other languages) sentences anymore to figure out who did what to whom in combat). Other significant changes were the addition of the threat APIs, Lua coroutine libraries, and in general, large additions that opened new possibilities and ideas to happen.
Addons were rewritten and vastly improved in TBC (think KTM->Omen, Titan Panel-->FuBar-->LDB-based, etc, as good case studies), and addon communities formed (you should research on how/why/when wowace/wowinterface/curseforge formed). Various automatic addon updaters/installers proliferated (with its own history and updater wars, notably the Curse/WowInterface versus WoWMatrix war, this itself is another good research topic - it sparked a whole debacle about addon copyrights and addon author rights, with many authors changing their addons' distribution license).
Post 3.0 (Wrath) though, these changes become infrequent, and Slouken moved on to other projects. Ideas begin to die down, what's possible and what isn't became more well known. There's only so-many-ways you can write a boss mod. There's only this many ways you can display a HuD, only this-much-stuff you can do with a bar addon. New addons that popup would often just improve on an older addon, there isn't really anything particularly revolutionary except perhaps the AVR addon that Blizzard decided to break.
One main thing you may not realize is that the majority of addon
authors write addons for themselves - rarely for the community. Many do not mind sharing their work online on sites like these and provide some support in their spare time - and that's the extent of it. That said though, programming itself is an interesting and challenging pastime, almost nobody writes WoW addons for money, and Blizzard even decreed that addons must be free in their addon policy and contain no advertising, when Carbonite addon overstepped their bounds and added some advertising in their demo version of their paid addon product.
WoW by now, is a mature game, and as a byproduct, addons also matured, the UI's limitations are known. Subscriber numbers are stable, but not because people aren't quitting WoW - people ARE quitting WoW, but new subscribers come in from new countries and languages that WoW is being launched in, such as Russia, and it will soon be localized to Brazilian this year. Addon authors quit wow too, and many addons die with them.
The Golden Age has passed, and this is evident by less activity on the UI forums, these/wowace/curse forums, and less WoW/addon related talk on the IRC chat channels. There hasn't been any great debacle or notable incident since the "Ban Gearscore" ones, and that was over a year ago.
[[The above are my personal views and not representative of others, you may use it for your research. Information provided may not be accurate, especially in the time line, as they are from memory.]]