Adobe ditching Type 1 fonts

[Karl Berry]

    Is there any chance to change this in the near future, so
    that OTF fonts could be included partially, too?
    Or are there difficult technicel reasons why that's not possible?

It is difficult, yes.  Encodings are a major question.  I don't believe
Thanh or any other long-time pdftex developer has any time to work on it.

Thanh wrote an article about using TrueType with current pdftex some
time ago: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb30-1/tb94thanh.pdf
(Basically, choose an 8-bit encoding and run ttf2afm.) It will give the
flavor of the problems, at least.

Related: the VTeX developers implemented OpenType support in dvips.
  https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb38-2/tb119tolusis.pdf
Again, encodings are a principal issue.  Their method requires
dvilua(la)tex, as I understand it.

Happy hacking,
Karl

P.S. Please don't include any "tex-live-bounces... at tug.org" address in
any mail to the list. It just ends up generating a bounce message to me.
I don't know how it got started, but let's please not have it continue.
E.g., your message had:
  Cc:  <tex-live at tug.org>, tex-live <tex-live-bounces+khzimmer=posteo.de at tug.org>
Only the first address is desired :).