First, Sorry for posting this suggestion here (I've just signed up and don't seem to be able to start a new thread on this topic). Perhaps someone could insert/delete the following idea on my behalf. I have been actively using CI for 7 years now and had almost dropped it for Laravell but hesitated due to my large code investment.
I would like to propose enhancement to CI's existing active record implementation to use either the existing CI-Datamapper ORM, or Laravel's Eloquent ORM.