CI Redis cache driver

that is stupid... and probably the reason why CI is losing developers
if you are doing something do it all the way and not just half way

I'm sorry you cannot grasp the concept of a generalized abstraction layer. That has absolutely nothing to do with CI or it's popularity.

Why would you expect CI to wrIteie a complete wrapper for Redis when phpredis can do that job perfectly? Again, you can include phpredis in just q handfull of lines of code in CI, or any other framework if you like. You are not bound to the CI cache implementation.