The problem right now is that plugins create a screwed up state of the world and their usefulness is rapidly climbing. Installing the vagrant-chef-zero plugin,

The problem right now is that plugins create a screwed up state of the world and their usefulness is rapidly climbing. Installing the vagrant-chef-zero plugin, for example, is a real PITA because the dependency resolution doesn't deal with a json dependency correctly leading to it or chef zero failing to load unless you install them in a very specific order. On the other end of the spectrum, when you're writing a Vagrantfile it's technically almost impossible to know what's going to happen when a user starts it up because of all the hooks plugins can throw in, and you can't tell Vagrant not to load a plugin (which would be an incomplete solution anyways, since I can't know what plugins or plugin versions will have bad interactions). I know you wrote vagrant, so you have a more inside perspective on this, but as a user and occasional plugin writer, it feels like with a gemfile I can specify a state of the world that's considerably less screwed up than the completely random world any given user's install of Vagrant might be.