This only works for few high profile projects. Most projects developed this way die of development resources starvation. Once you have added all those features

This only works for few high profile projects. Most projects developed this way die of development resources starvation. Once you have added all those features you will face all the consequences of developing a complex system -- difficulty to get anything done, new devs requiring substantial amount of time to get started, people getting discouraged quickly, etc. As you add complexity, the ways users use your platform will grow exponentially -- potentially causing an explosion of bugs. I don't mean users using your platform in many different ways is bad, the question is "Can you support it?" If you run into developer resource starvation users will find that you are making no progress and will find an alternative and this will make your project even less enticing for contributors. This is how a project dies. If you are single developer and want to do something useful for community your best shot is to make something simple and add things judiciously. So how do large open source projects survive and how are they different? The issue is that when it comes to contributors, relatively few large projects receive most of the contributions. Everybody wants to contribute to something well known, high profile, used by a lot of people. Not many developers want to make it their mission to support a useful but an obscure plugin to something else.