Just a few ideas here.
I think Lucee and CFML are mature. Thus the need I see is less on more syntax and language enhancements but more in making the eco-system easier to use, deploy and manage.
This to me entails, looking at enhancing the tooling and supporting people along their whole dev life-cycle: What are the tasks that eat a lot dev time? Which environments do devs use? Where do their customer want to deploy and manage?
The attractiveness of node and .net is that there are many tools that spell out the whole ecosystem, i.e. devs have a cookbook. This is where I would also place the box language efforts.
In other words, I am still hoping for easier “Cloud Native Development” with Lucee without workarounds and manual steps.
For example, Lucee could have a command line tool like node or .net and make it easier to create frameworks and projects that deploy with one line. The early versions of the “serverless framework” were a good example in my opinion.
How attractive would it be to have a tool that allows you to develop locally and push things with one line for the world to see.
e.g.
lucee push staging --AWS
Make same starter frameworks and templates available for common use cases, e.g. RESTAPI, GraphQL, TODO, TaskRunner, Lambda, etc.
lucee create ProjectName --RESTAPITemplate --dev --AWS
Cheers,
Bilal