Priorities for the next 12 months

As part of the BAC/TAC/staff meetings later this week, there has been a request for my/our top five priorities for the next year. The ask is for a one line per item + a short "why now" elucidation.
Please let me know what you want so I can present the committers' input to those present. Even if you are unsure, say something. Any discussion or input is far better than none.
Dmitry Belyavsky Wed 1 Oct 2025 7:05AM
Removing ENGINE support and probably some more deprecated stuff
Extending EVP_SKEY support

Paul Yang Wed 1 Oct 2025 7:26AM
Mine is:
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Support Distance-Preserving Encryption (DPE)
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Since: it's very useful in LLM inference with RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to protect the privacy
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Paul Yang Wed 1 Oct 2025 7:31AM
And I am glad to do a very brief introduction at the B/TAC meeting to RAG and related data security demanding in case not all of you are familiar with that realm.

David von Oheimb Wed 1 Oct 2025 7:38PM
To me, top priority is to get all PRs merged that change the API.
Next priority: reduce as far as possible the backlog of other open PRs. Many of those await reviews/approvals since long.

Paul Dale Thu 2 Oct 2025 5:06AM
This is the suggestion I put forward for tonight's BAC/TAC/staff/directors call:
https://openssl-communities.org/d/6xLRj8rw/face-to-face-meeting-bac-tac/2
Tomas Mraz · Wed 1 Oct 2025 7:49AM
@Frederik Wedel-Heinen We already have it as a priority for the Foundation as we have some funding to help with that (not for fully implementing it but we hope to finish it together with you and broader community).