In essence: Everything that is related to panning (and that's quite a lot - file export would even be the most trivial part after everything else has been implemented) would have to be rewritten, we'd have to add 3-dimensional panning commands and most importantly, people would have to write music that actually takes advantage of this feature to be worth anything. Judging from your previous request formulations you do not actually use OpenMPT to create your own music, so do you even have an idea how hard it is to make a good-sounding stereo mix, and how much harder it is to make a good surround mix? I know you have some good ideas but I would appreciate it if you restricted your ideas to things that you would actually use yourself, and not something you would want to see to be used by someone else.

sigh Point taken. I do plan to start making my own music soon, though, and I have been experimenting and getting to grips with the software.

Welp. Making my own music never happened. I should stop making predictions about the future! Also deeply sorry for flooding the issue tracker with requests back then.

The beauty about open-source projects is that anybody can contribute, so I’m going to get in touch with some people and we can possibly try to implement 5.1+ by ourselves via fork. Wish me luck!