I'll try to answer a few things.

I know the communication hasn't been great. I complain about that myself. When things are announced, we prefer it to be substantial and real, so no announcements of upcoming announcements and no announcements of things we're thinking about maybe doing. It also should be noted that bitcointalk forums aren't really a primary communication source for the company. You're much more likely to get info from the subreddit or twiiter accounts, or any of the methods listed on our websites.

What we're working on at the moment is merging the shopping checkout/payment tech so that there is one solution for customers to use with the best features of both.

The giveaway coins, to my knowledge, are in cold storage (as in paper wallets in a safe), except for a small chunk of them which are used for promotions and giveaways (for example we did a thing with crypto art where there are ziftrcoins behind the paintings). They're still going to be given away eventually. Everything is just delayed by a few months due to the merger. I've heard that merchants want to be part of/involved in the giveaway process. For hypothetical example giving them away to attendees at a movie launch/premier/opening night. So I'm assuming we'll be moving some to them in the future. I also believe we're still planning on giveaways of our own.

For the record, we've never sold (or bought aka pumped) any coins on any exchange. The 800k number that gets thrown around was total media overhype. The total sold counter was based on an average. The value of Bitcoins at the end of the sale was less than half what it was at the beginning.