Not sure calling it a missed opportunity even if I personally would have liked it. Pushing more power into it has quite diminishing returns (I did some testing on that) and the general public does actually seem to care how thick and heavy their laptops are. So framework choosing a relatively common size and weight bracket was probably a good idea, going with a thicker chassis optimized for weirdos like me could easily have been used as a gotcha against repairability/modularity. On the other hand my argument about framework going for mass appeal falls kind of flat when you consider it’s still lacking a touch option, which seems to be something the general consumer is quite into.
But hey a man can dream, make the thing like like 6mm thicker, up the battery to ~99 wh, size up the cooler a bit, maybe give it a bit more/bigger heat-pipes or hell a vapor chamber and ship it with ptm preinstalled. With the thicker chassis we can also do stuff like put in a second full sized m.2 slot and break out the rest of the pcie lanes as an 8x occulink or mcio or something port. The first 2 things would not even need a change in the mainboard and would likely only add a couple hundred grams.