It's funny, I've had the opposite problem. I was trying to write an IRC bot in Python, noted there didn't seem to be a standard library module for the IRC protocol, and so found myself looking at this:
That's 400+ results - at least 20 of which are actually IRC protocol modules. There's no way of telling how mature each one actually is 'til you download it. It turned out the first three I tried were undocumented, buggy, incomplete, or otherwise no good.
So I gave up on PyPi and hacked it as an xchat plugin instead.
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Perhaps the way forward would be styling your package repo after, say, addons.mozilla.org -- add just enough community functionality (as in ratings/reviews/"times downloaded" counters/etc) to allow the occasional gems to rise to the top of the muck. Once one solution for a given problem has been established as the best (well, most popular), that'll get more eyeballs on its internals as well, and it'll only increase its lead until it's de facto standard -- but the possibility is still there for a newcomer to dethrone it if it's genuinely better. And meanwhile, both can exist side-by-side without causing ugly compatibility issues.
I believe that PyPI used to have some kind of popularity contest functionality that got killed.
I have to say I'm not sure that selecting the package you want to use is really the problem which PyPI needs to solve. It isn't the app store. That said, PyPI does provide a 'weight' in searches, which seems to track with popularity and freshness somehow.
The title text on "weight" says "Occurrence of search term weighted by field (name, summary, keywords, description, author, maintainer)". So, not popularity/freshness, just a rough metric for how well it matches your search.
Indeed, PyPI might not be the right place for a community rating system -- perhaps a site could be built on top of it to provide that sort of functionality.
http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=search&term=IRC
That's 400+ results - at least 20 of which are actually IRC protocol modules. There's no way of telling how mature each one actually is 'til you download it. It turned out the first three I tried were undocumented, buggy, incomplete, or otherwise no good.
So I gave up on PyPi and hacked it as an xchat plugin instead.
----------------
Perhaps the way forward would be styling your package repo after, say, addons.mozilla.org -- add just enough community functionality (as in ratings/reviews/"times downloaded" counters/etc) to allow the occasional gems to rise to the top of the muck. Once one solution for a given problem has been established as the best (well, most popular), that'll get more eyeballs on its internals as well, and it'll only increase its lead until it's de facto standard -- but the possibility is still there for a newcomer to dethrone it if it's genuinely better. And meanwhile, both can exist side-by-side without causing ugly compatibility issues.