That sounds like something that could be solved by having crates.io provide a curated list of common popular crates for certain features. That is, this seems to be mostly a documentation issue.
It’s really a reputation bootstrapping problem, for which popularity can be a useful proxy. For me to use third-party code, I have to trust that the future behavior of the developers will be reasonable: I want my side projects that don’t get touched for months or years to still mostly work when I get back around to them.
Not everyone or every project will have the same desires, though. Sometimes, a fast-moving experimental library is the right choice. The trouble is figuring out which I’m looking at.
I'm not sure I follow these concerns about "working in the future" - as long as you specify versions that work for you in your Cargo.toml file, that should work at any point in the future given that you use Rust 1.x.
If you'll want to update to always be on the latest version of each crate, well that discomfort about them potentially not working is part of the price.
If I come back to something, it’s because I want to resume active development. Keeping a dependency pinned at an old version makes that more difficult in various ways, so I personally value forward compatibility.
Not everyone does, and that’s fine. I just want to know what a library developer’s stance on it is before I try to use their library.
