This may sound silly, but if you think about it… maybe not so much.
Grasshopper is a plugin to rhino; but what if it was the other way round?
Rhino constrains Grasshopper to be linked to a 3d modeling environment.
No doubt that Grasshopper focuses on 3D modeling, but there is no reason I can think of, for it to be
limited to that.
What if Grasshopper was the base platform and Rhino a 3d interface built on top?
I absolutely love Rhino but I would also love the ability to run grasshopper as a super-lightweight multi-dimensional programming platform that can run all kinds of scripts, maybe even from a raspberry pi. Robots, smart homes, OS automation would become its perfect domain. Rhino would remain its ideal companion for exploring 3d applications.
Grasshopper heavily relies on all geometric functionality that Rhino provides. If the referencing was the other way around we’d either have to develop another geometry engine, or have a non-functional, standalone Grasshopper which only works once some other app plugs into it and starts providing thousands of geometric operations. That other app could then be Rhino or some other 3D platform.
What do you think the odds are that some company other than McNeel is going to invest in that?