Just curious, is an update to Houdini Engine to support LOPs HDAs coming down the line?

My understanding is that most of the major DCCs will be supporting USD in some fashion by 2021, and in order to best interface with those applications I'm wondering if Houdini Engine will get an update so that the applications are exchanging USD data, instead of having to convert, for example, between Houdini-native and Maya-native data representations like they are currently.

No, there is no plan to make any such change. For existing use cases, this would involve changing things with no actual benefit (since it's just geomtry data being exchanged, and USD isn't really a better pure geometry interchange format than what we're already using).

For future better integration between USD and Houdini Engine, we do plan to create a USD dynamic payload plugin which will allow USD to execute an Houdini Engine procedure as part of the USD composition process.

Thanks!