Well, first, like I said, it's a hope, not an assumption.
I think making data merge reliant on a PDF fix is an odd assumption, personally. The two don't really have anything to do with each other, so I would be surprised if it's even necessarily the same engineers working on the two features.
It's not a dealbreaker for affinity in general. I already own Photo and Design on both PC and iPad. They're great. It's just a dealbreaker for my being able to use Publisher remotely full-time, despite the very-cool StudioLink feature. If I have a Creative Cloud account anyway, there's just no reason I'd use Publisher instead of InDesign at the moment. *shrug*