Putting a 
after that is cruel 
Yeah I know. But unfortunately there isn't a :jumpingforjoy: smilie.
Seriously though, the new cube map support (for envmapping) should greatly help use of bump maps, for coders at least. The DDS loader is getting a slight recode in order to handle cube and volume maps so that you could ship prerendered environment maps with your mods and you wouldn't have to think about whether someone had render-to-texture support or not. And the OGL code is getting a change to handle using texture maps this way, which is just one thing that cube and bump mapping has in common.
Also there is a rather serious issue with rendering passes at the moment... main pass, specular pass, env pass, extra lighting passes. It adds up and makes things extremely inefficient. If bump mapping is also done in an extra pass then I think you begin to see some problems with all of this. Fixing this requires the support of new features. New features need hardware and software support which may or may not exist. New features need better extension and library support from the game. New error handling is need. Extra code paths for rendering is needed to properly handle all hardware which doesn't handle all available features... by now something of a pattern should be developing.
Some of those things is what's causing the delay on OGL render-to-texture and envmap support. If the game uses the new render-to-texture functions then your video drivers HAVE to support it as well or the game won't start (sort of like missing OpenAL libs does). That's not a very good situation which is why the GL libs are being converted from something that's linked in at build time to something that's loaded a runtime. Extension support has to be changed to deal with this, OGL init/setup and close has to be modified, and we need better error detection folded into the new changes. I can assure you that adding/fixing render-to-texture, envmap and bumpmap support is the least of my concerns right now. :jumpingforjoy:
