i don't see that ever happening as long as Gavin remains lead dev. there's no one even close to him that has the political capital, trust, or good will he has generated.
We'll see.
The reference client has already lost the technical lead to btcd, and their dev team is orders of magnitude more functional than Bitcoin Core's.
In addition, he doesn't have as much goodwill as you think. I'm not the only person who's noticed that there has been no substantial development in the reference client for about two years.