In general, I definitely agree with the frustration that a lot of these problems have been solved over and over again and yet most authors still aren’t adding the extensions to their own games. Creating a single uber-extension-- ideally one that’s polished and useful enough it might be included as one of the default I7 extensions-- could be a big step towards solving this.
(This all relates to the larger problem of extensions not getting enough visibility. I see a lot of posts everywhere with people wishing that there was some way to do something that there’s already an extension for. But I think this is another discussion.)
I would be very wary of including Keyword Interface in a package like this, though. It fundamentally shifts the IF paradigm to something a little different: and, as was just mentioned, breaks the low-level parser assumption that “first word equals verb.” I found with Blue Lacuna this led to a lot of extremely-difficult-to-diagnose-and-fix type errors.
What might be better is an instructional message: rather than actually trying an action, tell the player that the story expects verbs to come before nouns.
Smarter Parser also has issues, too: I’m quite fond of it, but it can slow stories down fairly significantly, since it’s doing a ton of regular expression matching. This only happens for misunderstood commands, but in Javascript interpreters it’s a point to consider.
In fact, a lot of the extensions under discussion here have some tradeoffs that make me a little wary of lumping them all together in one big package. Sometimes certain features conflict with the way a particular game works: letting people pick and choose by cherry picking which extensions to include has advantages. However, at the end of the day I think the benefits of such a package probably outweigh the gotchas: we can start for a baseline of “Hey, include this one extension, and if you have problems, you can just include the individual components instead.”
Other questions that arise: who maintains the uber-extension? If people keep updating the included extensions, do they have to update them in two places? If an author wants to take one of these extensions off in a more experimental/computationally-expensive direction, does it just fork? I guess none of these are really serious problems. Ideally there could be some sort of collaborative maintenance, so the individual authors could update their own segments, but we’d need an infrastructure for something like that.
One big advantage of the uber-extension is that it would make it easier to solve compatibility problems between newbie-assisting extensions. For instance, I just in the last day noticed that Implicit Actions and Modified Exit (both candidates for being added to the initial list, by the by) are currently incompatible with each other, since they both have a rule by the same name. These things would be a lot easier to catch and fix if people were actively trying to combine them.
Let’s keep this discussion going… I think good things can come out of this.