Tuts+ Premium is the only Envato service that operates with cleartext passwords, and it was a known internal issue for us, with a plan currently in progress to upgrade away from the current plugin.
Still, this not being priority number one for them (before even making this service public!) means I will never do business with them. It says a lot about how they value their customers.
Not if you depend on a software that requires plaintext passwords (as they obviously do). Whether it's a wise choice using such a software is open to discussion though.
Sometimes business/marketing managers and IT security managers disagree. Looks as though the business guys trumped the security guys on this one. That happens a lot in the real world.
Since there's no such thing as absolute security, all security effort is a balance between an assumed threat and the havoc it could create and costs. So it's always business vs. security. I'm a bit on the fence here and I guess I'd have taken another route but well, if the product was not viable without the plugin... Who knows.
Given that: My remark was directed at the blank statement that it's always easy to switch. It obviously is not in that case, the change was on the agenda [1], so it's a bit tough that this happened in the meantime.
[1] At least according to the official statement. I don't have any reason to believe otherwise.