[lavabiopsy]

That's also another aspect where the plugin API vendors have not much incentive to fix things, because users can just use another thing on top of it (JUCE, DPF, etc) that makes better progress towards solving these issues from the developer perspective, but still DAWs are left with the tractability problem for other plugins that don't use that.

To me, if there is any interest in solving that, I would just expect someone to put a new plugin backend in JUCE/DPF that is specific to the DAW and then compile that together with the plugins into a big giant build. That's more what I mean by "dropping plugins", it's how you avoid the MxN problem too. But I think that many DAWs (including Ardour) gain little benefit from doing this at this time, so if that was what your original sentiment was, I agree.