Vetting the cargo

There is a curated list of crates at https://github.com/rust-unofficial/awesome-rust which I've found a few useful pointers from, though I'm not sure how good it is in general. (It doesn't even list serde explicitly, just some serde-related crates. It does list clap, but alongside another CLI library that only has 50K downloads in 2 years and was added to the list by its author and probably doesn't deserve to be there.)

I guess you can get better recommendations by asking on various forums or chat rooms, but it would be nice if that community knowledge was distilled into a more easily accessible location.