Emacs is a powerful editor (or operating system disguised in a text editor), and some packages are extremely powerful - they improve efficiency diagrammatically.
It might be useful to spend limited time on learning and getting efficient with the most useful packages. Is there a such place to look for statistics or votes on most useful packages?
"Useful" is quite subjective, but the popular packages are probably useful to a lot of people.
The most popular elisp projects on github can be found here https://github.com/search?l=emacs-lisp&o=desc&q=stars%3A%3E1&s=stars&type=Repositories. But there are three entries right in the top ten which don't belong there.
And then there is http://www.melpa.org/#/?sort=downloads&asc=false. Here packages that are still under development tend to accumulate more downloads.
Despite these deficits these two resources should give you fairly accurate representation.
I am just using Paradox as a replacement for list-packages. It displays the number of GitHub stars and has the ability to sort by stars.
Just try it.
Just to refine a bit the answer by @tarsius, here's a query for repositories with >50 stars, that were updated after a week ago. It only gives 58 results. If you want more, you can lower the amount of stars, or take an earlier date.
