From my limited time using pure Pi, I found quite a few of the plugins lacking and had no desire to upgrade/fix and maintain them myself. I know others feel differently though.
I like the idea of keep Pi minimal but having “official”, high quality optional plugins to make it more usable.
I'm exploring the pi based options now and I like that Oh-my-pi actually adds new value over extensions (the advisor and stream interruption hooks are pretty clever).
I just wish it had a way for me to downlimit tool access (I love midsized local models, and I'd love to enable only 30% of the power for some usecases).
Making the upgrades or maintaining or crafting from scratch a plugin isn't free, it costs tokens and time and attention. And you're almost assuredly reinventing a wheel that someone else already did and probably did better. I like have the ability, but I prefer not needing it.
Funny you mention that because the OMP GitHub issues (https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi/issues) is almost exclusively attended to by a very efficient bot. I routinely submit issues and they’re replicated and resolved (via PRs) in ~30 mins.
To your question: it’s the difference between one person and an agent working on something vs an experienced dev and the entire community.
Oh-my-pi seems to like robo coding, while pi itself is entirely against vibe coding for production. (The clanker is a tool, not a free wheeling agent.)
And I see that tonight pi has had their regular devs ship (https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/tags) new releases with modified thinking levels for GPT-5.6 while roboomp is discussing this back and forth with some contributors in oh-my-pi's repo.
From my limited time using pure Pi, I found quite a few of the plugins lacking and had no desire to upgrade/fix and maintain them myself. I know others feel differently though.
I like the idea of keep Pi minimal but having “official”, high quality optional plugins to make it more usable.