You assume the metrics you have are sufficient to determine intent and importance, that your users needs are uniform enough for those determinations apply, and discount the possibility of making things worse by communicating the wrong thing. These assumptions perennially land developers and inexperienced designers in hot water designing things like this.

> "most important"

Yes— the problem is determining the most important metrics for the human who's reading the dialog. Sorting the second part is a lot more difficult than the first.

> With unlimited budget

This framing is only useful to determine what behaviors would be great, not feasibility. We seem to both agree on the ideal behavior but not on the feasibility.

> you could compare a bunch of metrics to a baseline to figure out what might be important.

Important to whom?

> Have a lot of stars, way more than the average? That would be nice to highlight. Only have a normal number of forks? Probably less important to highlight that.

Average for what? Just average for everybody? For the deprecated SlackTextViewController which has vastly higher numbers overall than the unmeasurably more important net-snmp? What about for repos that serve as core functionality to frameworks that only care about forks? XML Schemas that people refer to but never interact with? What about for a company that doesn't care about stars because they're incredibly popular outside of that repo but it's critical for them to monitor the small number of people who've forked their repo?

> Sure there's probably extremely rare edge cases, but for most repos, comparing against a relatively small number of metrics should get enough to paint a picture of what might get broken.

The repo about which you said this mistake should not have been possible was an extremely rare edge case. The article went to great lengths to explore just how fantastically different this repo was. And if you're talking about painting pictures you're using the wrong medium. More information can make the message more pointed but only if it's brief and extremely relevant. If it's not, it's going to reduce the focus on the danger message.

> Everything else can be hidden behind a "... and X more" if people are curious.

Aaaand we come full circle. The whole point of this is to put the metrics most important to that user right in front of their face in bold type because that's going to stop autopilot mistakes. If it's hidden, it failed. Beyond that, the order in which you list things connotes importance— closer to the beginning means more important. Being hidden connotes far lesser importance. If you put the wrong things at the top and the right things behind a click then the autopilot user subconsciously assumes they'd care about the hidden things even less. You're increasing the risk of failure rather than decreasing it. If you're going to highlight anything, you better highlight the right thing.

The existing dialog is pretty clear that you should investigate what it does before you actually execute the command without giving people false clues, and that may be the best compromise. You don't convey false impressions but still convey danger.

> At the end of the day, Github repos aren't extremely unique.

From a quantitative perspective they're not incredibly diverse, even if they're probably more diverse than you imagine. What is immeasurably diverse is the roles those software packages serve, the people who interact with them, and what they need to accomplish their goals. Assuming you can boil that down to a heuristic using available data is something that needs to be concretely proven— not assumed.