> It seems to me to be better overall to keep it as its own thing and just support phoenix, especially if it never makes it into HBase proper. If it does make it in, then ripping it out of contrib when upgrading to 0.96 will also be much easier.

There is other work in HBase besides Phoenix which could use this, like [HBASE-6572](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HBASE-6572) so the chance is good I would say.