My sense is that most of the energy in the Scipy community around data interchange is happening with Apache Arrow or the Consortium for Python Data API standards, which are admittedly much broader in scope than the Python buffer protocol. I’m not saying the buffer protocol shouldn’t be improved around the edges, and I think having something simple built into the language makes a lot of sense, especially for basic data exchange with C libraries, etc., but I think the efforts to build something more universal for data science are likely to happen outside of the language.