The Ruby community is always likely to prefer MRI because that's the core that the majority of gems support.

So, yes, on the surface of it, this particular Ruby build might appeal to people looking for performance.

But from a language research position it is interesting to decouple concepts like GC from the language so that they can be studied and optimized as a pattern and then be potentially reapplied to any language runtime.

I agree that some concepts might be pulled into MRI Ruby 3, but OMR may be a powerful testbed for language researchers to debate GC strategies and measure effects in various languages before committing to a single language integration.