A great feature of Red Hat AMQ Streams operators is to build the KafkaConnect cluster adding the different plugins that you needed [1]. That feature could use a url link to get and download the plugins wanted or needed.

A sample of that feature is: 

---
apiVersion: kafka.strimzi.io/v1beta2
kind: KafkaConnect
metadata:
  name: eda-kafka-connect
spec:
  build:
    output:
      type: imagestream
      image: eda-kafka-connect:latest
    plugins: 
      - name: debezium-connector-postgres
        artifacts:
          - type: tgz
            url: https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/io/debezium/debezium-connector-postgres/1.7.0.Final/debezium-connector-postgres-1.7.0.Final-plugin.tar.gz

Currently the DBZ plugin tar.gz files are only available from the upstream project in the Maven2 Central repo. So if you want to use the supported plugins by Red Hat, then you have to download from the Red Hat Access Portal [2] before, so then you could not use this build feature.

So it could be agreat feature to publish the plugin tar.gz files in Red Hat Maven repository (https://maven.repository.redhat.com/ga/io/debezium/), then the customers could link them directly in the KafkaConnect CR. The building process to create KafkaConnect and KafkaConnectors will be easier without manual tasks.

[1] https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_amq/2021.q3/html/using_amq_streams_on_openshift/api_reference-str#type-Build-reference

[2] https://access.redhat.com/jbossnetwork/restricted/listSoftware.html?product=red.hat.integration&downloadType=distributions