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

The 40,000 buy was roughly 1.5 BTC of value - not exactly what I'd expect before a new dev steps in and tries to take profit from the development

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.
That would be useful, but I think the priorities need to be focussed on the protocol:
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.
Three algos might be too much, indeed.
PoB needs to stay, of course

And I like it that the current combination is PoB/PoW. There are currently more than enough PoS coins for one. And coin distribution by mining in the PoW process shouldn't be underestimated. I think being able to mine a coin (instead of buying the coins) is for some people a very important option; the option to buy still remains.
But how is the PoB difficulty determined by PoW? My understanding is that the PoB difficulty is determined by "nEffectiveBurnCoins". There is only the dependency that between PoB blocks need to be (at least 3?) PoW blocks.
Why are there still PoS blocks in the chain?
I thought PoS would have been deprecated by a123's release (e.g. block
209477 is a PoS block).
Do I interpret this right that PoS blocks now have no trust value and don't generate rewards, but are still in the block chain?