I'm not sure the developer ecosystem that Magento currently has would be responsive to that - I only worked with it a little, but it seemed like 75%+ of the "solutions" to issues people ran into were provided by other devs saying "well, if you pay $$$ for my FooBarBaz plugin that problem will go away".
I'm not sure what your point was. You described exactly what I was saying should happen. The core is just a platform to build upon and all the features you want are simply modules you add to the core. Now, if the modules you want are free or not is another story.