Skud's Quality vs. quantity article was interesting. I wonder if people are afraid to hack other people's code because they once tried to comprehend their own code after a two week break, and figure that it'd have to be that much harder with other people's code. If this actually is part of the problem, I guess the solution is literate programming.
Skud's article also reminded me of something I've been thinking about for a while - The Trouble With Freshmeat. If you look at the entries one after the other it looks like a million monkeys wanking on typewriters, which is depressing as hell to watch.
I reckon that free software development should look like that - unless you can filter based on topic (which fm.net allows to some extent) and other criteria such as stability, installed base, user-friendliness and empirical reliability metrics.
You might also want to check the metrics for each project's dependancies and work those into the evaluation. For example, project foo may look OK, but it uses barlib which is a bitch to install, so I don't really want to know about it right now.
I suspect that group-trust-metric-like objects might be useful in evaluating scores for the more warm and fuzzy criteria above.