To run a VST as part of the Roon Core and accommodate current + potential future plans, it would have to be more cross-platform than any VST plugins that I’m aware of. Linux support is particularly limited, but it would be very difficult for us to release a major piece of interoperability and leave ROCK and Nucleus out in the cold.
I don’t think that we could confidently market a VST feature that was hobbled with a “headless only” limitation. It would raise questions and breed discontentment. The group of people willing to slog through and use something like that would be a small, technical subset, not our general user base.
I don’t see much of a way to make this work. The compromises are too great, the effort is not small, and the best possible product that we could build inside the constraints is not a very satisfying one.