Anything involves James nodecoin would need a great deal of luck to go through.
I've bookmarked this. Care to wager a NEM stake on this?

Listen, I understand you're the head of NEM. Respect for you and your team. Somehow, in all the 'fair distribution' talk it's forgotten that CfB, Jean-Luc, CIYAM, James and others are a killer team. We're not waiting on an alpha, or picking out logos -- we're testing features now as I type this.
I wouldn't wager my NEM stake if I wasn't 100% positive.

Are all those people still involved in NXT? I thought CfB's contract was up. It looks like Jean-Luc and wesley have made all the commits for at least all of April:
https://bitbucket.org/JeanLucPicard/nxt/commits/all. Is there another repro where other people are contributing?
CfB hasn''t left totally. He is still around, and waiting for DGS and asset exchange to finish. CIYAM is of course still working on AT project. James is supposedly "working" on dozens of things, but they don't involve changing nxt core. These are all his own projects. There are many others working on various projects (like android apps, games (
http://www.nox.am/ ) websites ( nxt.org, etc)
The front page of the game demo does look inviting. I could agree that NXT is still the most exciting alt coin system out there currently.
That game does look kinda cool. Overall NXT is a great project and I don't think any of us hate it.
Regarding messaging, I must say that I like the idea of a messaging app based on NEM. Perhaps in the future we could add "temporal secure messaging" that lets you send messages that will disappear after, say, 10 days, but have a discount so that they are cheaper to send than real messages. I don't think this is a huge priority for the first version of NEM, but it seems that we could add something like that in the future.
Pruning the blockchain probably won't work because it is a contract with the community that once things in the blockchain, they stay in the blockchain (unless stated otherwise from the start). Breaking contracts is not cool.