Besides avoiding having to manage its own authentication system, one important future direction is federation. So ensuring you can associate accounts as being ‘the same person’ on multiple servers is a significant boon for the future.

As a community, many of our conversations and notes are spread across five or six servers in different people’s control. We’d like a better experience for that long term.

Email login is pretty good now though if you don’t want to deal with Google or GitHub, and now that LDAP and SAML is available for free, intranet is pretty doable with standard conventions known to most IT departments.