i talked to @hanssv.chain the last days because I have an idea where extending the TTL could be solved with a smart contract based solution which incentivizes users to extend names of others by getting a small reward.
I already started programming it and unfortunately some helpful and necessary AENS built-in methods for Sophia are missing and require another hardfork.
AENS.update is absolutely mandatory for the solution I want to provide
AENS.owner and AENS.expires_at would also be good and are - in my opinion - absolutely inevitable to build a secure and useful AENS marketplace (which is also something I respectively kryptokrauts are planning to work on)
I would definitely like to see these built-in methods being available with the next hardfork.