Just hopping in to provide a brief reply on this topic. Ultimately, no, I cannot see us lifting the restrictions on Ripfire or Digital Control tops in any form.
To us, it's much safer not to permit these in standard competitive play. If we were to permit these, Digital Control would
definitely be forbidden from use and would be nothing more than a glorified Ripfire Driver. And even then, the Ripfire Drivers aren't going to impact the metagame in any way, nor do we expect that anyone will go out of their way to use them, so there's an element of it being safer and easier to keep them banned.
It's also worth noting that Hasbro banned these in their own competitive play events - such as their World Tour series - which speaks volumes for their own stance on these and reaffirms our own approach to them. Somewhere, even they aren't sure whether these should be compatible for use with their mainline tops or if they're worth the effort to permit and regulate.
I will agree with the point about Ignition, Hybrid and Generate blurring this line a little bit. However, given that these are all parts we are closely keeping an eye on and have already been banned in Classic (and two of which will be banned in the upcoming Limited format), a comparison to these doesn't help their case.
This is something we can review in due time and with some thorough testing and investigation. But for the foreseeable future, it is unlikely that we'll lift restrictions on these.