This has been discussed pretty heavily before, and the issue really boils down to two problems: the difficulty of getting into Extras, and poor packaging practices (partially due to ignorance/laziness and partially due to lack of good guidlines).

Fixing those two issues would greatly improve the application installation experience. A user would only have to enable Extras to get access to all the applications (and their dependencies) that they could possibly desire, and good packaging practices means much less confusion as to what those things actually are.

The Downloads section is pretty much just a showcase of what's available, and (in my rather badly-perspected opinion) not particularly relevant to the core issues. It should certainly stay up, though.