I don't know about the long-term plans, but the new multilib approach is much more elegant (at least in theory, maybe not at ebuild level). Instead of depending on a bunch of pre-compiled emul-linux- ebuilds (which contains specific versions of a set of packages, and may be hard to maintain), multilib ebuilds can depend only on what they need, and the libraries will be built from from source for every needed architecture.
Now, the transition to this may be hard. A lot of ebuilds depend on emul-linux- ebuilds, and these now start depending on native multilib ebuilds (instead of providing th