Hi all!
Well, your questions are easy - to ask. Answers however are not so simple.
If panorama sucks? If you want to have os/2/ecs just working somehow - it definitely doesn't suck. It allows you to install aged os on very modern hardware. It is universal - so it supports wide range of hardware. In theory you must not bother if ecs will install on particular video card, no matter what you have you will get screen working. In those aspects it's similar to other drivers presently developed like acpi, uniaudio and genmac.
All those drivers are about to cover wide range of hardware and increase chance that ecs will find it compatible enough to install and work on it.
But here similarities end. While uniaudio supports more than 2 audio channels on hd hardware, acpi let to use more than single core of modern cpu's (among other things like apic for instance) and genmac allows to use wi-fi cards - panorama does not provide any benefits from having better software. No matter how fast video card you put into - you will get VESA performance.
While other drivers give you progress over past (more audio channels, more cores, faster wi-fi standard) - panorama gives regression - slower performance, no 2d acceleration, no native panel resolution programing, no nothing.....
To give you some clue...
In panorama faq, one of advices how to increase slow desktop operations...
"... to increase speed of screen operations you might try to disable "full window dragging"..."
So, now we must answer to ourselves - what do we want from os/2/ecs in the future? Just to install on modern hardware. If so, then it's okay. We should be happy. Perhaps for next couple of years it will be still possible.
But in such case we must say good bye to comfortable work with office suites, web browsers, bitmap viewers and of course to video players. Maybe such limited usability is ok for somebody, for me it is not.
Such shrinking functionality will not attract new users. Instead it may speed up migration to other platforms developed with future in mind. What advantages will have warp over other platforms? WPS? With unpatched bugs inside and closed sources? Kernel? Dead and depending on "how long will ia32 instructions in new cpu's" be supported? Who's going to pay for ecs? Owners of 486's and pentiums I? Can you see many corporate users buing new machines to run ecs on it?
What will be next generation of ecs video drivers? Text mode monochrome for fullscreen non-wps apps?
It won't work that way for long. New bounty is needed here. Decent video driver with full 2d acceleration
similar to snap - or os/2 death will have to be confirmed.