Personally I would very much like to see a feature that would allow 3rd parties to communicate with anope without the need of going through a relatively slow MySQL server or so.. whether something like that will be done is another matter..
As for rewriting anope, that s what the development branch, 1.9, is about. While not a rewrite per se, it ports anope to C++ and as such parts of anope are progressively being rewritten, though not from scratch.
There have been modules for 1.8 that allow anope to take commands through SQL, from direct connections, but I don't think one was ever completed and considered "stable".
For 1.9, it aims to support a live MySQL DB backend reducing the need for an API like interface.. Doesn't make it less interesting, just less likely to be done in the foreseeable future..