Two weeks ago I opened the config of the MCP server I run behind one of my Spring Boot services to add a second instance behind the load balancer, and remembered, with the specific annoyance of a developer who has been here before, that the thing held session state. Protocol sessions, initialization handshakes, sticky routing. A protocol for agents, the most stateless-feeling workloads imaginable, and horizontal scaling meant session replication or pinned connections.
That complaint is now officially obsolete, and four other things I have grumbled about are on the chopping block too. The MCP maintainers published a new roadmap this week (241 points on Hacker News and climbing), and unlike most protocol roadmaps, this one reads like a list of the exact papercuts you hit if you actually run MCP servers in production. It covers what landed in the 2026-07-28 spec release and five priority areas for what comes next.
Full disclosure: this is an analysis of the maintainers' roadmap, not a review of shipped final features. The 2026-07-28 changes are real and live in current SDKs. The five priority areas are direction, with SEPs at various stages. My production servers still largely speak the older shape, so where I tell you what I would do, that is a plan, not a war story.
