The blocker on merging is still testing with altcoins. If someone can set up a node for a non-litecoin alt using the 1mb_hardforked or lowmem branches and mine to it for a while, and maybe verify that it forks cleanly to v17 and then v32 shares, that would speed things up a lot.
You are joking, right?
Bitcoin is the mother of all coins!
P2Pool has long supported both merged mining and solo mining of many alts. Maintaining that compatibility is important.