I’m generally fine with not changing the slug and getting downloads and reviews… But the only reason should be an official – from both sides – planned handover (and not takeover).
But in this special case, there are other reasons too:
- Avoid confusion!
- The chance: as good as ACF is, there are quite some technical debts in it too and a “new” plugin can be a chance to clean this up. (this still can happen)
As much as I like ACF, and we are using it in every project (mostly the pro version)… if there is a core plugin with a similar feature set, we will just switch.
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And there were other cases in the past, where a very good single-feature plugin got bought and transformed to some bloatware… We also have some free plugins, tried Freemium in the past. For me, there are reasons for this happening.
First and foremost: no direct git support (or better Github) support for the repo. They always speak of “community”, but thanks to missing git it makes very hard to contribute at all. And then, as a developer… you don’t get anything using the wp.org repo… never ever someone donated for my plugins… To be honest: Automattic is earning money, riding the GPL-train as hell, but don’t give plugin developers a way to at least cover costs…