Hackpad is an Etherpad fork, so you might conclude that someone has already done the work of wrangling Etherpade code and making those patches. ;)
If collaborative editing were the main focus of what I was working on, I'd say "yay, market opportunity!" But as it is, I just want to be able to plug in (and contribute to) a good open-source option. Which may wind up being Etherpad, but I'd like to do better ...