I got a message of BCNext regarding this. He is thinking about changing the mining algo, a new approach will used Cunicula's proposal to assign a unique id to each coin. If this way is not flawed then we'll get trustless pooled mining. There are no details yet, the concept may be changed.
We didn't heard anything about this since then. Any update?
I think from a purely PR standpoint this would be one of the most urgent feature.
The fact that smaller Nxt holders can take a while (a long time actually) to forge a block, is one of the most frequent complain about Nxt. New adopters who only want to invest a small amount into nxt, and use to mining, don't like the long forging period, they became angry and dismissive about nxt.
I feel that this sets back the acceptance of Nxt by the crypto community.