Wide widgets haven't been ignored. If you've been following along on GitHub, you can see that we've worked through various solutions, but simply haven't found one we love. We'll have support for wide-widgets — its not a technically hard problem to solve, its more a UI/UX problem — and I'm confident we'll come up with a good solution.

I don't remember anyone saying that it needs "a lot of work," but there are some tweaks we're working on in preparation of being merged into core.