Endangered packages

If developers empirically find that one choice of upstream package is
better than another, one would think they would gravitate towards it. If
the case is (one possibility among many) that the statistics already
reflect the general quality of the upstream packages, then might
developers consulting the statistics end up producing the same result
anyway?

Another train of thought is that developers consulting the statistics
could either converge (onto a power-law formula or another formula) or
diverge as a result of the feedback which that effect produces on the
system.