I think you're reading "at this time" as "never" when in reality, they want to do that separately since that sort of conversion is a huge undertaking in its own

I think you're reading "at this time" as "never" when in reality, they want to do that separately since that sort of conversion is a huge undertaking in its own right. Additionally, separating it into two steps allows them to more easily launch this as a preview feature, get feedback, and then commit to a design before trying to overhaul the whole standard library. If they try and do it all at once, that gives them little room to actually iterate on the feature.