I have not abandoned Version but I am tied up with "real life" stuff e.g. job situation.  That said, if mindfox and crew want to put development resources/effort in and submit pull requests I will not turn them down as it only helps everybody.

I started going down a path that is, unfortunately, very time consuming.  The problem is because of our fork issue, there is kind of what you can think of like a "plug" trying to go through a pipe and clogging it up - which is a large chunk of orphaned chain that needs to be processed through and then things go on - but this processing consumes a huge amount of resources and brings the RPC interface etc. to its knees, which causes a big operational problem for the pools.  So, part of the solution is to get the codebase onto leveldb as it is still on bdb.  Unfortunately, this is not so simple to achieve.  There are also some threading improvements that could be made, etc.  One possible solution that may be easier, is to take a codebase that is already on leveldb with recent updates, and then port the Version coin parameters, difficulty algorithm, and block reward algorithm over into it.  This may prove faster to implement than bringing leveldb into the existing code base.

For normal users its not a blocking issue, but for pools who depend on high RPC throughput it is a problem.