A cliched topic, maybe, but I felt it was worth bringing up again.
Even after all this time, there's still two old plugins I really, really like.
Clavius & Beyond, and The Grinchians.
Clavius is where some of my oldest EV memories are. I remember flying around in the Neutronic Kestrel, and busting up enemy ships with my dad -- getting blown out of the water in my shiny Phantom by a Korg, having trouble landing on planets, etc. Those were some very cool times. Everything was new and fresh.
The Grinchians appealed to my desire for heavy firepower, but it did it in a cool way, with a cool story. Like with Clavius, I have some good memories from playing it, and they're pretty deeply in (this stuff happened over five years ago).
As high in status as these two plugins are, I also like New Horizons -- the big plugin that did so many original things, but yet could have been much more. In many places, the tech design was old and tired -- the balance was lacking, and I can probably count the number of ships I've seriously flown in it on one hand. But it was still fun.
- Bob