He's said before that he is in favor of a heterogenous network composed of multiple implementations - perhaps Bitcoin Foundation's job is to piss us all off and get people to take a serious look at btcd and Bits of Proof.
I wonder what it would take to make Armory work with btcd instead of bitcoind...
btcwallet, the wallet daemon for btcd, reads and stores its wallet data in the same format as Armory. there are likely some rpc calls that need to be added to accommodate it.
the gui for btcd, btcgui, was just recently released and works fine on testnet. mainnet coming soon...