These are both long shots, but CPU based components that enable Skin & Morph ( Collada pipeline? ) would be a great addition. Personally I think GPU powered skinning is too costly for the average system out there ( especially when combined with shaders ), so going with a CPU approach to bridge the remaining years towards 2012 would be great.
Skin ( or Envelopes ) is a technique to animate objects by bone influence. Technically this means that each vertex of a object contains a list of bone objects it draws influence from ( in percentages, totaling 100% per vertex ). Prior to this 3D games almost always used separate body parts linked together by hierarchy ( 32-bit era ). Good examples of this approach can be seen in games like Mario 64 and Tomb Raider. Morph is a technique to animate objects by keyframe data on vertex level. This is often used for facial expressions / muscle toning etc. Both techniques have been standardized by the industry and are supported by most file formats these days. COLLADA is one of those ( open-standard & XML based ) formats.
