This 100%. Moving forward, what we need more than anything are design tools that do four things really well:
- Allow code-based, atomic design specification as a standard rather than a feature set.
- Enforce visual accessibility standards to at least AA level, and non-visual accessibility standards such as semantic markup on components, etc.
- Allow product teams to develop lexicon within the design tool while keeping track of data points and points of data interpolation.
- Output cross-platform, responsive, stateful components that either adhere to platform standards as-possible, or deviate from platform standards where necessary.
Bottom line, the tools that are going to shape the future moving forward will be backed by, work with, and output code-based design, with tokens, variables, and contextual data that the product team can take into the development phase in a seamless fashion.
Ideally, we will see some form of Des/Dev IDE that is entirely collaborative which enforces good design and development standards and by doing so lowers the barrier to entry for designers, developers, and organizations.