Packages and frameworks are great, but they exist because they solve problems that core PHP doesn't solve well. That's why there are so many different ORM layers and databases classes and templating frameworks. For example PHP gives you the nuts and bolts to put together a database class, but there still isn't a good, reusable library I can plug in to my next web app without having to mess with details like handling exceptions for update operations and so on. (PDO is close but not there yet.)

Instead of centralizing a bunch of 3rd-party packages, PHP might better benefit by putting together a cleanly designed, optional, STL-like layer on top of the exposed nuts and bolts. Something like the powerful classes .NET provides. That way, a person could point to the official, well-documented, core-supported way of doing something like querying a database or subtracting two date objects instead of pointing to yet another "ultimate" PHP extension repository, maintained by who-knows. It might include things like rich database encapsulation, clean and obvious escaping of output for PHP's built-in template functionality, better datetime classes, and so on.

SPL is kind-of-sort-of heading in that direction, but right now it's more for things like iterators and lists--still nuts and bolts. PHP is building some of the stuff I described into the core--there's an equivalent DateTime class now, though it's still in its infancy, and PDO is getting closer and closer to being a pluggable database object. But we've still got a long way to go.

End the need for massive 3rd-party extension repositories and frameworks by building the necessary basics into the core. My dream would be to be able to have a PHP object library like the .NET ones. (Just the basics--DateTime, String, etc., not nightmares like DataGrid.) But I suspect PHP is too weighed down by its syntactical baggage and twisted history to be able to rise up to that dream.