As you know, there are many plugins to do authentication in Kong. We started with jwt, then a coworker decided that we needed a more flexible approach so he basically forked the jwt plugin to add stuff for our needs. It quickly became confusing and hard to maintain.
When we tried to introduce a new feature (tokens similar to what Github offers with personal token, that is a revocable token with a given set of permissions), we had a rough time.
In the end, the decision to fork the plugin was maybe not the good one and the decision to bring the token feature into this plugin were maybe not the right one. But still, working in the plugin code was unpleasant in my opinion.
By the way, keep up the good work, it's a solid piece of software!