"Now I'm starting to see one of the posters gripe about jQuery plugins. And for me I think that is by design. jQuery I believe was designed to be a lightweight as possible. Practicing modularity at it's finest. Had jQuery been baked with all the bells and whistles, I do not think it would have attracted a large number of devs."

Doesn't the use of a plugin system generally increase lightweightness and modularity because you can move more functionnality out of core into optional add-ons?