First, thanks for the great questions!
We believe that one of the big values of MyEclipse is providing an inclusive, supported turn-key environment for Eclipse-based J2EE development. There are already hundreds of individual plugin providers for Eclipse so those that want to take the time to review the world of available plugins, test them for functionality and compatability, get support through each individual support model (if any) and then build a development environment in a piecemeal fashion can certainly continue do so. In fact, this was the only model before MyEclipse and one of the primary reasons we created MyEclipse. Having everyone repeat all of this work is just a big time waster that takes development teams’ focus away from building business functionality.
However, we do realize that our Enterprise Workbench will contain more capabilities than are needed by any one development team. For example, we offer many more application server connectors than anyone probably needs. To address this, rather than trying to support installations of every possible combination of servers, we bundle them all together but allow you to disable the ones you don’t need. This is really how we plan to address your desire to pick and choose capabilities with other items going forward.
As far as adding new capabilities, we have a process in place for our user community to nominate new plugins for integration into MyEclipse. With your feedback, we can continue to grow and improve the product in a way that meets the needs of our user base.
Re WSAD 5.0, as soon as IBM ships a WSAD version based on Eclipse 2.1, MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench will work with it since EW installs as a product extension to any Eclipse 2.1-based product. This is one of the reasons we chose to install as a product extension, rather than as a full product.
–Scott
MyEcipse Support