I would also like to express my disappointment at third party users being thrown under the bus once again. Several people have been putting a lot of effort into supporting third party users, so it really saddens me that this is dismissed as an irrelevance by some so easily. Third party users were not thrown under the bus. Unfortunately, the solution you are looking for in terms of extension installation is not yet available with the current tools available. That is just the unfortunate truth. We are not going to misuse libraries and hack together MediaWiki just so extension installation can be *slightly* easier.
-- Tyler Romeo 0xC86B42DF