Thanks for the detailed explanation above, I understand and I can help testing some of the plugins of course, though there could be a more effective way to control the whole thing.
May be it's possible to involve 3th party developers, still active on their plugins, in maintaining the descriptions updated, giving them some edit rights somewhere in this site, just to tell other people that a plugin is still compatible with current version of Zenphoto. May be you can add a sort of automatic "category downgrade" for the plugins, based on last edit timestamp of their description pages here.
Don't know if this is easily achievable, but I think that it could help the community to grow up, and stimulate external developers to work on it.
If anybody has other ideas and suggestion, please join this discussion.
PS
The orange question mark looks better then the red exclamation mark indeed!