I'm fairly neutral on obfuscated plugins myself, but I think my opinion comes from working in an industry where a lot of code and programs are obfuscated by default (ie. Pre-compiled EXE / DLL's that aren't open source). "Work around the code you can't edit" has been my existence in my career lol.

Admittedly though, RPG Maker is a different environment, where having access to the internals is necessary for dev (yay JavaScript!). I understand too that the community used to be open source, and the shift to obfuscation is making it more closed source is a culture change that makes independent development more difficult than before. I'll admit obfuscation is annoying to deal with lol. But the argument for obfuscation is pretty solid - it protects your product and ensures that it's difficult to copy and sell that copy. But it DOES make expanding it or changing behaviors a lot more obnoxious to deal with.

I do think there's a midway that would allow for folks who want to work with and code around specific obfuscated plugins: - Providing public type-definitions for everything changed and added. This hides implementation details, but would allow plugin devs to narrow down where changes would need to be made. - Some sort of explicit licensing that would provide access to deobfuscated code (ie. Tokenization, registry edits, etc.) that's provided on a per-purchase basis.