Is there appetite for a cheaper on-chain AO hash? (Ashlar

The question, first On-chain verification of Merkle proofs over an arithmetization-oriented hash is a real cost centre; rollup withdrawal proofs, storage proofs, anything that verifies a ZK-friendly tree in Solidity. Poseidon is the de facto choice and costs ~18,229 gas per 2-to-1 hash at a saturated optimizer in the maintained poseidon-solidity implementation. I have a design that measures 14,232 gas for the same operation, a 1.28× improvement, and I want to know whether that margin is interesting enough to anyone here to be worth pursuing toward something standardisable; or whether the answe