If I might chime in, not to bring up old posts, but I think I’ve effectively brought up a similar concern (regarding registries) in the past. Namely, that it’s not very clear to me what packages are “good” or provide “sufficient coverage”. For example in this comment on a mega-post I lamented not really knowing how to find packages that provide near-equivalent functionality of base Matlab, and suggested that it might be nice if one could simply “add” an Organization (such as JuliaMath). We continued the discussion in a separate thread.
I suppose my thought is that, perhaps, we could certify well-managed organizations and have the curated registry essentially be a union of these organizations where each organization maintains its own “gold” and “general” registries, and the curated Julia registry is the union of each org’s gold registry. The process to getting a package into Julia’s curated registry, then, would be to have a certified organization accept your package into their gold registry. In the case that there isn’t a suitable organization or a reputable group (e.g., NVidia, university research lab) wishes to maintain their own organization they could apply for certification, etc.