Thanks @sigurd.hansen_7559 !
All right, I'm convinced.... this makes a lot more sense now to do now! I didn't quite realize that Microsoft does not allow non-VSCode clients to connect to their Marketplace, nor did I realize there were so many VSCode forks.
The current plan is to create a new feed type called "Open VSIX" or something that will support connectors. It should also be able to handle the "multi-file packages" (i.e. how the same extension can have multiple .vsix files but different architectures).
We should be able to just reverse engineer the VSIX API as well. That's clearly Open VSIX did; it's not all that complex I think. I've just now updated the other feed types; we don't have a date just yet, but it should e in the coming months. We'll keep this thread up to date.