This is a great idea. I'm struggling mightily with Workbench, which has been left in the dust behind WL's new paclet robustness. There are a number of issues right now that would be no-brainers for an active open-source dev. community to fix.

1. Workbench currently uses a deprecated "experimental" function to include the eclipse workspace directory for paclet discovery, instead of the newly added PacletDirectoryLoad. It's working for now, but is threatening to break.
2. Workbench has selection buttons for Deploying paclets to \ $UserBaseDirectory and \$BaseDirectory, but not to \$UserBasePacletDirectory, where these paclets should be installed
3. The syntax highlighting is outdated as there are commands that aren't recognized.
4. Workbench generators warning messages (Problems) because it doesn't understand the most recent PacletInfo syntax, especially the many new Paclet Extensions
5. Deploy to Archive doesn't use CreatePacletArchive to generate a .paclet file, but instead turns everything into a zip file.

Obviously WRI is having trouble keeping this up-to-date. Certainly the development community could pitch in to help, as well as bringing other features to the table.

Thank you, Stefan, for taking this into consideration. I know this would be an unbelievably generous present to the community and the chances are that it might not happen. In any case, even discussing this internally and listening to the community is incredibly kind. I hope you keep us posted on the outcome.

Great idea. Perhaps there could be an open-source community to maintain and extend the code, similar to what Apple did with Swift.