In fact you wouldn't have to. You could just use it as a plugin wrapper, network representation and optimizazion would be of some use only for some (experimental? advanced? strange?) hosts. Personally, I would use such thing for my project. Then, who said that it has to hide such informations to the host?... It is definitively not a plugin arch wrapper, but a kind of "inter-application jack-like connectivity tool for processing objects with already existing plugin archs wrapping and network optimization capabilities". As it goes when you build a GTK app, you don't have to use each library function, and so it would become just a plugin wrapper. Maybe the two things can be split, but maybe optimization could hardly depend on each processing object interface (aka plugin format).