[TeMPOraL]

A side point here is that it's incredibly hard to make people stick to abstractions when not sticking to them gives a competitive edge.

Say we've implemented your entire idea with JIT-optimized message passing. What would happen there is people learning ins and outs of particular JIT implementation and JIT-hacking being a required topic on job interview, just like today knowing millions of ways of hacking CPU cache is something expected from a professional (non-web) programmer (web programmers are expected to know there is something called 'processor' and that it doesn't like nested for loops; source - was a professional web programmer).

Anyway, while OTP does a pretty good job of papering over some of the local/remote objects difference and helps you keep the whole thing running even if something external breaks, I think it would be cool to go further in the direction of the ideas you just described.