I would be very happy if they could move in some standard user authentication into rails. Tired of the stream of plugins that become abandonware in a couple of months.
Also, thanks to github, if a plugin is popular enough it never really gets abandoned. Look at the engines plugin. The author of that plugin rarely does anything to it, but people fork it and keep it up-to-date.
well most of the authentication plugins are only 100 lines of code or so. Even if the plugin author dies in a freak accident involving toothpicks, you should have no trouble maintaining the plugin yourself.
Are they all pretty much the same? Is there currently a reigning/most popular plugin floating around?