Further tasks such as distributed computing could in time vastly help the project, I know it's fairly easy to slave blender renders to a farm -a few projects have already used distributed groups to perform rendering; i bet it'd drastically improve workflow if the CAD team could simply post items to a render cue rather than have to utilise their work units cycles.  This would allow larger volumes of animations and visuals to be produced (which is one of the main things we like seeing :) ) without slowing the work flow.  It might even be fairly trivial to make mechanical simulations and stress testing or other processor intensive jobs a shared task, a distributed platform for the maker community could in time grow to involve evolutionary design algorithms and the like to allow automatic solving of electronic circuits or structural design issues.