Marco here, Kong's CTO. We hear you, we are aware that plugin development is not as easy as we wish, and we are planning to rollout a few improvements next year to make it mainstream, including:

- A built-in Lua plugin API that abstracts away the underlying complexity of NGINX and OpenResty. Among other things the plugin API will make it easy to interact with the lifecycle of request/response objects.

- An official testing framework for plugins (unit and integration tests).

- A new DAO to get rid of some magic and make the overall system more robust and extensible (with an in-memory DAO implementation for example).

- Support for remote gRPC plugins to support plugin development in any gRPC supported languages.

- And finally supporting plugin installation/versioning within Kong itself using the HTTP Admin API to install/uninstall plugins cluster-wide on any Kong node (as opposed to installing plugins on the file system).

NGINX and Lua (on top of LuaJIT http://luajit.org/) were chosen for their reliability and performance, the next step for Kong is to focus more on making the overall Kong ecosystem bigger therefore simpler plugin development is a very high priority item in our roadmap.