Runes and inscriptions are as programmable as bitcoin, and improvements to bitcoin's expressiveness also the expressiveness of runes and inscriptions.
Examples include:
- OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY would allow organizing open mints as OP_CTV trees which unfurl to leaf UTXOs containing the runes. This would allow for open mints where you either get the runes or your transaction isn't mined and you pay no fees, making it impossible to bid on an open mint, pay fees, and get no runes.
- SIGHASH_GROUP would allow more flexibility in committing with a signature to groups of inputs and outputs. It would allow selling variable amounts of runes from a single UTXO, without needing to split, sinc you could commit to your input UTXO, the output runestone, and the payment output. This also makes it easier to lift runes onto the Lightning Network, for arcane technical reasons.
- Standardizing the Taproot signature annex with a carve-out for unstructured data would allow making inscriptions in a single transaction, instead of needing a commit transaction and a reveal transaction.
And there's probably more!