Just about this bit:  The main blockchain parts of Namecoin are mostly in place, so what new features do you expect?  The releases are based off corresponding Bitcoin Core releases plus added features (e.g. in the last year we added proper support for encodings of names/values, improved the RPC interface in general, and just recently allowed sending multiple name_updates in one block).  So if you think the project is dead because no "interesting features" are added, do you also think Bitcoin Core is dead?

(I'm not talking about applications built on top of Namecoin here, like .bit.  There is also lots of progress with those, with others apart from me working on it.)