Once and if SOF is ready to support all available atom configuration, it should deprecate and replace it with the same fashion catpt replaced its predecessor. Until that moment, things should remain as they are. No additional quirks or magic, just plain simple ACPI-ID based selection.
We have lots of users for the existing legacy Baytrail/Cherrytrail driver and we cannot ask distributions to switch one sunny day.
I reached out to Hans and Jaroslav to understand how this deprecation might happen, and it has to be done in steps. First include the SOF/BYT-CHT driver in builds, experiment and test and after a successful test period switch over.
Keep in mind that Intel folks have only a very limited subset of the hardware based on BYT/CHT so we have to work with the community to get feedback, that's very different to Broadwell where there are only 3 platforms to be supported and an extremely limited number of users impacted by a switch since we are out of the ChromeOS support period.
In all cases, distributions and users, not Intel, make the call.