is it better if you do solo mining? forgive my ignorance. 
You can only solo mine at the moment
And I think it will last forever because the title says CPU - Solo mining only, which means only CPU miners can mine it and there will be no pool involved.
This is not a NERVA fork. The codebase is Monero v0.13 and the proof-of-work algorithm is custom made and different to that of XNV
Any update? or something that you want to do or achieve before the end of the year?
And are you a one-man developer or you have a team?