"create new plugin" option missing

There aren’t any such causes. The Create New Plugin will be available under the Plugins menu. If it’s not there, you don’t have the Pluginception plugin activated.

I certainly hope I get more support than that. I’m not lying, the option is not displaying… here is a screenshot showing what I’m seeing (or rather not seeing):
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27668/permanent%20tiny%20nest%20things/forum%20posts/pluginception.jpg

Well, the menu item is connected to the “edit_plugins” permission built into WordPress. If you lack that permission for any reason, then the menu item simply will not show up.

There’s 4 cases where you won’t have that permission:

1. You’re not logged in as an admin user.
2. Your site is on a multisite configuration and you’re not logged in as a super-admin user.
3. If the DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT define is enabled, then you can’t edit files.
4. If the DISALLOW_FILE_MODS define is enabled, then you can’t edit files either.

Any of those cases will prevent the menu item from appearing. In such cases, you also won’t have any plugin or theme editor displayed in the WordPress admin interface either, so you wouldn’t be able to edit a plugin from there even if you could create one.

Thank you. I found that 1, 2, and 4 were not applicable, but that DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT was set to true in my wp-config.php
I set it to true and the option appeared upon refresh.