This approach leads us to an increasingly complex and awkward scripting system, as we add more and more special cases which must be maintained forever.

If we can restore script as it was originally, as a general programming language, we don't have to try to "pick winners", and you don't have to ask permission to do what you want with your own UTXOs. Doing this safely and cleanly is my current area of research.

My favourite thing about this approach is that following soft forks become less about "is we had this new feature we could do X” and more "this would make existing scripts more efficient and allow us to do X% more in a block" which is a much more quantifiable assessment.