Winmodems are a very sensible idea. You know software-defined radio? They are that, but for modems. Expandable to support any current or future protocol, at the cost of CPU time. Why do we like SDRs but hate SDMs? That's an irrational position.

The actual problem with winmodems was them breaking the established software/hardware boundary, and the Linux community not having the resources to follow suit.

Nothing stops someone from taking the free Windows Vivado and making it run on Linux, or taking a Winmodem driver and making it run on Linux, or writing a from-scratch software implementation of a 56k modem that can run on any sound card plugged into a phone line (which is what a Winmodem is), or reverse engineering then bitstream format for these FPGAs and writing a compiler from scratch (or even half of one - just the device-dependent backend would be a major improvement and the frontend and optimizer could be shared with other toolchains). But nobody actually stepped up and did it, which I think is proof that the free software community is a lot weaker than it thinks it is.

You could even do it right now, if you wanted to. You're not, and I'm sure there are good reasons for that. Extrapolate it across all developers, and it seems none of them have enough reason to do it, unfortunately.