That was my second fallback until a couple of months ago and in fact I did some work for openresty too for luajit. Openresty luajit2 however has a bunch of extensions that are incompatible with Lua and luajit, making it unsuitable as the stock luajit replacement. It would be possible to make those extensions conditional on build flags but the blocker there was the fact that the maintainers did not seem keen on doing releases and more importantly, moving too far away from luajit. Overall it was just simpler to start doing releases myself to fulfill a need (a more central place to maintain fixes for distributions) and then work towards a convergence.