I don’t think many are going to disagree that addons such as Wire and PHX and used by a large number of people. The issue with such addons is that they use many small files which becomes a performance bottleneck when loading. (Due to the harddrive’s limited random access performance.)
Additionally there are two types of files which case these problems, Lua files and Assets. (Model / texture files and so on.)
I’ll start off with the Assets: If they could be loaded as a single large file, the hard drive performance would no longer be a substantial bottle neck. This could be a single zip archive which can be either compressed or not depending on the user’s system. The archive would be “mounted” in the system memory and accessed using file mapping. If the user had lots of available memory, the archive(s) may be fully loaded into memory and therefore compressed archives may be used to save space. (As decompression would only be needed during loading.) If the user has limited memory, the archives may only be able to be partially loaded as required, requiring decompression during the game and hence no compression may be better. This system is like that of the Game Cache Files.
Next, Lua files: These not only suffer from the problems that Assets have, but also suffer from execution performance issues when used with complex addons. These issues could both be solved by writing entire addons as binary modules instead of collections of Lua files. This could probably already be done with the current setup, but would be easier for addon developers if had a native interface which could allow more direct access to entities and the like. In other words, the power and simplicity of the Lua interface but with native performance. Also as all of the code would be combined into a single .dll for the addon, it would not suffer the multiple files issues mentioned above.