@Richard_Culver, other than the performance, what shortcomings can you see in Everything Nodes compared to ICE? I haven’t had a chance to look into it properly, and I’m rather curious. I develop a sort-of-competing system called Flakes (remember that? It has been a while 
; the thread and the video are really outdated), and I’m kind of trying to assess if it’s still needed or wanted in Blender. The project was a bit stale during my master’s degree, but it’s well back on track now. Funnily enough my ETA is also around late 2020.
My point of contention with node systems has always been, that they tend to be domain specific systems with highly opinionated architectures that serve very particular purposes. Flakes is entirely generic programming language with no such restrictions. How everything works depends entirely on how the modules are built. E.g. we might have several entirely different particle systems with wildly different governing logic structures.
The problem with integrating something like that to Blender is that everything has to go through these really clumsy low performance interfaces. I also really wish they’d address that before building these grand systems on top of the old core.