The year is 2026

Core

VRF Support
Bond support (VPP already supports bonding, and AF_PACKET mode bonding is handled within the OS)
MPLS Support (Core Facing Uplinks) (LDP and SR-MPLS)
Dataplane crash recovery improvements
High Availability / Geo Redundancy
Architect the AAA framework properly without having dependencies on RADIUS, a user of osvbng should be able to fully drop RADIUS with osvbng.
Automated performance tests in a physical lab (or at minimum, control plane testing)
Hardware availability (Test on more generic setups like Dell R'series, HP DLX GenY series, SuperMicro etc...)
Event Bus from plugins into core (for logging/alerts/traps/etc...)
Build/use a better test framework
Figure out how to improve operational insights on VPP, trace is very limited, but most interesting packets end up in control plane anyway so we have full visibility to expose metrics/debug tools
PPP LCP offload
Offload IPv6 RA (not fully, but programmable)
NAT/CGNAT implementation (potentially as a plugin)
General improvement of developer workflow / contributing
Public event presentation at least once this year (Telecoms/ISP meetup)
Get more general feedback from community/public