On the vanillabox focus is purely manual at the moment, but with modifications to GRBL it's possible to route the beam power commands to a different function.
GRBL 1.1 is now laser specific so it does ramping around corners and GRBL 1.1 Arm leaves lots of overhead for extra things like that. (because it's arm based you can also switch between smothieware and Laos too as you desire)