It sounds like a good idea, almost like a natural evolution, but to
play devil's advocate I'll try to find some drawbacks for such a
decision.
One negative argument is overall complexity: there are many points in
code in which one needs to consider that the encoding might be
"something else". This isn't a new problem as we already support two
modes, but we've soon how much more difficult it makes things and this
is making things even a bit more complex.
The other problem I see is that this severely complicates
interoperability between different clients. Suppose two applications
are being developed to use the Infinispan Server and decide to use two
different encoders, I suspect that at some point they'll regret it
when needing one to access some data from the other... not suggesting
that this should be a good practice, but still it would be very
inconvenient.
Finally, tooling. We'll eventually need to work on better tooling and
supporting multiple encoders would spread efforts thinly.