Drupal has definitely matured and I believe that its developers are entering a period of introspection. This includes an eye towards unifying media APIs and reducing the difficulty for the end users of their modules. It is also entering an exciting time of collaboration, not just with the core of Drupal, but also in contributed modules.

As the developer and co-maintainer of the Embedded Media Field, one of the more frequent requests I have heard is to create an all-in-one media content field that can parse external video, audio, and images, at the same time allowing the upload and display of user-submitted media. I suspect other developers have fielded the same requests, which have been a part of the move over the past year or so to create unified approaches such as with Media Mover, Asset, Embedded Media Field, FileField, and so on.

Although it might be easy to dismiss that, there's actually no technical reason not to allow this. Due to some limitations of the browsers...