Some thoughts:
This diagram shows one of them, how we got to deciding to use Optimism ORU: https://github.com/dxos/gravity/blob/master/docs/content/diagrams/payment-diagram-2.png
The money is on Ethereum, but Ethereum is too slow, so we make a different faster blockchain but now we have to get the money on and off that chain and that's hard/unsolved, but finally if someone figured out how to speed up Ethereum finally then we should use that technique because that was the problem we started with.
This makes some sense, except : Optimism ORU is somewhere between an idea and a prototype at this point, and : using it implies we must move to the Ethereum platform (because Optimism can be viewed as a turbocharger for Ethereum mainnet that looks and feels like Ethereum -- it isn't a standalone thing).
This implies throwing away the work we have done on CosmosSDK.
And re-implementing it on Ethereum+Optimism. Another diagram: https://github.com/dxos/gravity/blob/master/docs/content/diagrams/payment-diagram-5.png (edited)
But in the current diagrams from Ashwin/Rick they didn't do that -- there's both the old and the new designs side by side. This implies yet another bridge has to be built between the two, another layer of turtles since that bridge has the same hardness properties that we began with above.
Another thread is that we would like to use existing open source projects (make vs buy decision) for various things. Most of these target the Ethereum platform. Diagram : https://github.com/dxos/gravity/blob/master/docs/content/diagrams/payment-diagram-3.png
Since we are not Ethereum-based, to use one of these projects we then have the choice between "porting" it to our CosmosSDK blockchain, or building an Ethereum emulation capability in our blockchain.
That Ethereum emulation capability doesn't exist in a turnkey form so we would need to do some of the work ourselves. Unclear to me that this work is less effort than porting the projects to CosmosSDK.
Note that there are now two quite different reasons we have EVM in our block diagram, but the difference tends to get lost in the discussion.