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I am a noob, so please bear with me.
I'm wondering whether the Bitcoin Core team plans to integrate a smart contract feature evolving the Bitcoin scripting language in a more sophisticated one in the near for far future.
Afaik, the only work currently done is on sidechains. Any clues?
there is no such improvement planned for the protocol, only the expected BIP are listed in https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/README.mediawiki. but you should understand why in bitcoin only a limited scripting mechanism is used instead a VM with a contract language as for Ethereum (security reasons). the project RSK aims to provide such opportunity through a sidechain, so explore it.
Improvements are made to Bitcoin's scripting language via Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, or "BIPs." Not all BIPs are focused on script, but some are. New op codes are introduced and agreed upon by developers and miners. Recent examples of this are BIP 65 and BIP 68. One of the benefits of BIP 144, or "Segregated Witness," is that its adoption should make scripting upgrades even easier.
It is important to note that a more sophisticated language alone may not solve all your smart contract problems. The other major hurdle is statefulness. Bitcoin natively supports two states: spent and unspent. Ethereum and Rootstock support a wider variety of states, which I believe Bitcoin would either have to hard fork or build via side chains.
Smart contract functionality for Bitcoin is being planned via Rootstock:
https://coins.newbium.com/post/292-what-is-rootstock-cryptocurrency
