It's quite funny... To me imu seems to be what they wanted shanks to be, but at the end of the day imu sword attacks reign supreme lol.
One other thing that comes to mind is Shanks supposedly being able to cancel out a users Observation haki. So I think that's what it comes down to is how you can manipulate CoC to achieve different affects.
I don't think it will ever be this magician stuff Imu is doing but I don't think it's farfetched to shoot out beams of haki when we already have flying slashes and whatnot. Technically even a haki spirit bomb should be possible or doing a vegeta's final atonement where you just blow yourself up by expending all your haki like Roger and Garp did for their attacks.
But even being able to do all that doesn't guarantee anything, just because it's coc doesn't mean a coc specialist beats an armament specialist. Luffy is a CoC specialist and just got bodied by a sword.
