Problems and a change of leadership and other negative events in NEM negatively affected its price and popularity. Perhaps this service will help NEM become popular again and begin to grow. It's great that the Japanese NEM community is so active and developing the project.
This is one of the oldest project in blockchain with communities in every country we know, there are just not much projects developed under them. Its probably not a very friendly platform for developers. I've read a thread here telling the team was in the brink of bankrupt but that might not be true. They will eventually regain if the the lose money during the last bullrun.
They were never bankrupt, the NEM foundation was simply applying for further funding from the core funds, since they were only originally funded for 2 years to begin with, and that time had passed.
The change of leadership has only been positive for NEM. Should also point out that the NEM foundation runs independent from the devs, but is there to assist development.
Regards being developer friendly, I can confirm NEM is very developer friendly and easy to build on, as its API driven and can be used by devs in the language they prefer to use.