Those of us who had posted in this thread received an interesting birdie-gram. I'm not sure I understand it all, so I'll just paraphrase parts. Comments expressed below in the first person are mine, not the birdie's.

SYLK does not share a lot of underpinnings with the DATA step. It actually has more in common with some other procedures (such as NLIN, NLP, MODEL) which have programming languages embedded within them.

Also, SYLK and the DATA step are developed by different departments at SAS. Budgeting for development tends to favor products which can be marketed as "solutions". The DATA step is at a disadvantage here.

There is underway development of a "new" DATA step. It's not clear to me whether it will be launched with a new identity, or whether it will be a backward-compatible replacement for the current DATA step. In either case, it's another factor working against enhancements for the current DATA step.

But to me, the hash object and the "dot" syntax (http://support.sas.com/rnd/base/topics/datastep/dot/dotaa.html) seem like major enhancements. I suppose they may be parts of the "new" DATA step just bolted onto the old.

SAS functions are generally implemented once for all environments. V. 9.2 will probably include a set of financial function corresponding to those in Excel (but meeting SAS standards for accuracy and quality).