I too had hoped for DACs. Believe me, I've repeatedly begged for DACs from my contacts within NXP. We are getting 1 DAC in the next chip, which is a lot better than none, but I'm pretty sure it's not because of anything I said. I'm pretty sure they decide the features based on requests from only very large customers and maybe by looking at what ST is up to with their STM32 chips?
There are 2 unfortunate trends affecting analog. It's well known that as mosfet channel lengths and other silicon process features shrink, the speed and amount of digital circuitry scales up, but the quality of analog circuitry scales downward. The same is true for flash memory, which is why use of external QSPI flash chips is becoming the norm with these fast parts. But memresistor technology may become possible in the future as things keep scaling even smaller...
The other trend looks like human factors. My best guess is iMXRT was mostly designed by NXP's teams who've worked on the iMX application processors, rather than the people with experience from Kinetis, HC08 and other microcontrollers. Some of their analog design decisions, like not bringing VREFH to a pin, seem downright negligent. Specs for the next 1170 chip are still under NDA, so I can't comment on details, but I will say it does look like they're learning some lessons in analog.
But the dream of a chip with very a high speed CPU and high precision analog on the same silicon die runs counter to the reality of semiconductor physics. As silicon scales to smaller feature sizes, only digital circuitry tends to reap the benefits.