Well, perhaps the 40.000 buy is a new dev stepping in ... perhaps he will dump again at ~ 10.000 satoshis, but maybe we have other problems solved

I think the priority for a new dev - or "slimcoin" or "a123" if they come back - would be to follow closely the development of Peercoin 0.5, which will be based on a newer codebase (the BTC 0.6 base of actual SLM is pretty old, there are a lot of useful commands missing) and merge the new peercoin code with SLM.
The other one is the decision how to continue with the distribution model: PoW/PoS/PoB? PoB/PoS? or PoW/PoB?
For me, both PoB/PoS and PoW/PoB have both advantages - three different block generation algos are a bit too much, I think. PoB/PoS would be "the ultimative green coin" without energy waste, but PoW until now determines the PoB difficulty, so it will be more difficult to replace.