Right now I don't think the current amount of engineering interest in Bitcoin is particularly healthy. Many long time contributors, including myself, have essentially stopped contributing for a variety of reasons (including uncertainty around political disruption of deploying even fairly boring new consensus changes, concern that too much bitcoin hashpower is controlled by bitcoin adversarial parties who would attempt to block protocol improvements, etc. on top of more generic factors). Lightning is also easier, faster, and often more interesting to work on and so it has diverted a lot of new blood.
The bips 340 341 and 342 if there is in the community a large consensus for their implementation, will in my opinion be one of the most important upgrades to Bitcoin. However, this implementation will also be a test of the community and its future, because if Bitcoin was already advertised by governments as a facilitation of money laundering, as well as the financing of criminal and terrorist organizations, with this upgrade, we will see strong attacks by political power.
Regarding to the hashpower, the new stratum v2 protocol, aims to further decentralization and break, in part, with the pools decision-making regarding to block protocol improvements.