I think it’s better to let Hex focus on serving packages. It would be too much work for me to go through 2800 packages and evaluate if they are good or bad and then decide which ones are the “best” in each category. The other alternative would be to have the “community” vote, but it’s not clear from your post how that should actually work. I don’t think it should be part of Hex either since Hex should focus on its core features, which is publishing and serving packages. There’s a lot of work running and maintaining a package manager and the core team has a long list of more important enhancements and features to work on before we can focus on curation or community voting.
It’s not a bad idea to have a place where you can find recommended packages. There is GitHub - h4cc/awesome-elixir: A curated list of amazingly awesome Elixir and Erlang libraries, resources and shiny things. Updates: and http://toolbox.elixir.pm/ already that does similar things. Maybe you can help out on those efforts? Both those projects use the HTTP API from the specifications and you should be able to build a service with the API that would be just as good as if the service was part of Hex.
