write a lot of code, add multitude of options, spice up the interface and win prize?

No disrespect to the efforts of the developers, and the solid reasoning of the judges, but in my humble opinion the winner of the 2009 wordpress plugin competition – the section widget which

provides a way to display section specific content on your WordPress sidebar with an easy to use interface. This new version comes with tabs support, so creating your tabbed section widget is just a few clicks away.

is not good enough to receive the prize.

I only needed to look at the screen shots to decide that I’m not going to recommend this plugin to any one

Who are going to be the users of this plugin? This screenshot alone displays more hardcore wordpress buzzwords than the “all I want is a simple blog” crowd understands, while it might be easier for the WP focused developers to simply add new sidebar for the places where the normal one is not good enough.

Oh, it even worse than that. When I want to hide a widget from the sidebar at a specific page, I just use CSS. It might not be the ideal solution as it wastes some bandwidth and CPU cycles, but your time is probably much more expensive than the cost of bandwidth and CPU.

In my opinion this type of contest should be decided on mainly two factors:

• Does it solve a real life problem for many WP users
• Can a non geek teenager use the plugin successfully without help

Based on this criteria, my favorites were

• Advanced Export for WP and WPMU which solves the problem of exporting big blogs from shared hosting were you don’t have a direct access to the DB. I only wish there was also a simple way to automate the process.
• One time password. In a world were we blog from a coffee shop via unsecured WiFi it is actually a security madness to use our password (which we probably use at other sites as well). A one time password is probably the best solution after installing an SSL for the blog. I wish it could have been integrated with the FTP server.