There aren't many pools and a few have had some hiccups which has lead to fluctuation in the network but things are ramping back up and the relaunch hasn't actually happened yet. The devs are just making absolutely sure that everything is above-board and highly visible so that people can be confident that this is a legitimate cryptocurrency that wasn't pre-mined and isn't just a pump-n-dump scam.
^^^^ This is 100% accurate. We have not relaunched yet but are hard at work on it. I'm going to reiterate that the COIN PARAMETERS WILL CHANGE WITH RELAUNCH. We have almost all the details worked out and I will post the updated coin spec PRIOR to relaunch just to be completely, 100% upfront with everyone. This spec-change has been called out multiple times everywhere I can think of just to be as upfront as possible. These changes are needed to ensure the long term health of the coin+blockchain; if you run the current numbers you'd find they are out of whack and it would take ~30yrs to mine all the MEOW available.
As jurassicfrog mentioned we are trying to be as above-board as possible. No one on the dev team is being paid (not even in MEOW), everyone is doing this voluntarily and there is/was no premine. My advice is mine/buy now before the spec change and don't sell!

There are also new, unique features coming with the relaunch; more info on that coming as soon as I'm 100% sure they will be ready for relaunch.