Short term, the benifit is definitely a small number of users and it's a lot of unneccesary work.
But if one zooms out and imagines a longer perspective there is a risk of standing outside an arena where everyone else is playing nice with eachother. Look at how Autodesk has prioritized USD in Max over pretty much everything else. If Max doesn't support USD, it will risk being thrown out of most pipelines in the future. And in the short term that only applies to VFX, and maybe users won't flee Corona over the fact. But once USD, MaterialX, OpenPBR, glTF are the ligua franca of the entire CG community tools that don't support that are going to be an odd choice.
For arch-viz there's a billion of Corona assets on CGtrader, 3dsky, CGMood etc. But if I was selling assets now, I'd rather just publish them in some common format that everyone can read. I think that's where we are going to end up. Assets in USD, glTF or Blender files. Unless there's a reason for it to be render specific, like it's a Chaos Scatter of a meadow or something.
I hope the corona team is just playing it a bit cool, and once OpenPBR is a standard that sticks they'll be all over it. Because who knows, standards have failed before and maybe it's just a big fiasco. But if not I expect it to be supported just like in every other application and renderer.
