Sure!
Having the possibility to natively write XCM programs directly within the smart contracts allows developers to communicate with other chains securely.
XCM programs could also be used by smart contracts to communicate with the host runtime, decoupling these ink! smart contracts from an opinionated pre-compile (which is not a bad thing necessarily).
Devs can use SCALE encoding and certain crates as if they were runtimes.
I believe it all comes to ink! making things significantly easier and bumping the devex.
Everyone in the ink! team must know about the proposed “merge”, which is trying to turn ink! into a language which can be used for both Contracts on Polkadot and Services / Parachains.
It is an awesome idea! However, the ink! alliance is not a large team, and turning this idea into reality in a timely manner could be challenging. That said, I can see the benefits. Perhaps after achieving a successful ink! <> PVM milestone, it would be a better time to assess something like the merge.
I appreciate your points, and your input is highly welcomed. We want to see ink! thrive, and we are working towards that goal in the best way we can. The more feedback we receive, the better decisions we can make for that purpose.