Better Module/Theme Listing Pages [#2213211]

Coming from the GDO discussion Exploring solutions: Better Module/Theme Listing Pages

It's pretty clear that our main module search page still looks pretty much the same (other than the order of the blocks and the download table) as it did in 2011.

It is so very, very text heavy like so much of Drupal.org

I think that we can do more to:

consolidate the blank space around the issue
remove unnecessary information (folks shouldn't be downloading the modules from the search page). Isn't the goal of the search page to get people to click through to the project pages after all?
check if we show the most relevant elements / Filters - if not, exchange
check inside the listing if the individual modules get the most important stuff over to the user
make it super easy easy to find useful modules/themes

Stuff to learn from from Joomla

clearly delineated categories on sidebar (ours is hidden in a dropdown and could be put in a user-friendly solr facet)
icons specifying type of module (C, P & M; see my comment http://groups.drupal.org/node/137914#comment-481559)
spiffy graphics/icons for many projects
blue colored bars breaks up the page (panels)

and also from extensions.joomla.org/extensions

comprehensive list of all categories and subcategories
number of items in each category

Stuff to Learn from Firefox

Firefox manages to cram a lot more information into about 1/10th of the space.
You get a very short description of a plugin that says what it does. If it is done well you get it and will install it.
Prominent extension ratings
Featured extensions
image, title, featured tag, very short description, rating, number of reviews & number of users

Stuff to learn from DrupalModules.com

Ability to search for modules by version number
Bar graph with features, readability, ease of use & documentation
Very short project description
slick ajax search
condense list with # users, project status & releases

Stuff to learn from WordPress - Ideas largely taken from WordPress.org Scares me

everything is about using WordPress, not developing it.
Search for modules, themes etc the information presented is about stable releases
available in more than one language
new users come to learn how to use it
everything listed on http://drupal.org/download must be officially released versions
29,794 plugins, 611,251,602 downloads, and counting

We can do better than this!