There have been a lot of attempts to solve that issue in the past.
The "blessed subset of libraries" never worked for many reasons.
Kepler Project worked for a while, but died for lack of funding.
At some point I created Lua Toolbox [1] to at least have some kind
of ranking of the most used gems in the community. The main feature
was the ability to explicitly endorse some rocks, so that you could
find out the most endorsed rock for a given category. It was kind of
merged into LuaRocks but I feel like it isn't really usable anymore.
There was also a plan to create a Lua Foundation to deal with those
issues, but it went nowhere...
Eventually I think what proved to work best so far is the Lua
distributions approach, where someone curates a list of libraries
and maintains a coherent whole, separate from upstream projects
like Linux distributions do.
