Hi,
Don’t hold your breath. Even in the Nikon Capture time, these plugins only worked on bitmap data. (JPG, TIFF, in-memory bitmap in Photoshop, etc.). If a RAW file is loaded, it must be demosaiced before a Nik plugin can do something with it. That is, exported as a JPG or TIFF, converted to an in-memory bitmap in PS or processed “à la DxO PureRAW” in FilmPack itself. All these plugins are originally and structurally only working on a bitmap and this will not change unless they are re-written from scratch.
Also, remember that the target market for the Nik Collection is not limited to DxO users. The Nik plugins have to work like they always did and be compliant with the Photoshop plugin interface to be able to work in PS and in any other compatible bitmap post-processing software. Why should DxO shoot themselves in the foot ? Note that even if ViewPoint and FilmPack are taken into account in DPL, it’s kind of an illusion : this is not exactly the same UI and not all features are available. So, I wouldn’t say that they are integrated in DPL. A good part of their code has probably been re-used in DPL and that’s it. Not something I would call integration. Otherwise, changes in the standalone products would be immediately reflected in DPL.
Now a question : why shoot in RAW if I only load the RAW file in a standalone plugin, get it converted automatically to a bitmap and use the plugin’s special and unique features against it ? For this kind of finishing, one will usually do the main work in the RAW processor, export and then load the bitmap file into the plugin, be it from the RAW Processor itself or using the standalone version plugin.