In regards to Monero: I don't see any sign of real development on GitHub, exception made for a few sporadic backports from bytecoin. Also the client is a memory hog (because it still loads the whole block chain in RAM) and in my opinion if they don't change that (like RIGHT NOW ffs) then in a few months it will be unusable even on a decent machine.
The Github repo is staging - dev doesn't get pushed to it until it's been tested, and even then the staging branch is not for production (that's what tagged releases are for). It would be absolutely insane to push commits straight into the staging branch, most especially because there ARE exchanges / miners / people who build straight off that branch, and if it contains bugs and falls apart we would lose credibility big time.
A month ago there were a handful of minor backports from Bytecoin, but there's nothing on the entire first page of commits that are anything but our work.
If you want to see the ongoing development, a good starting point is the Dev Diary in the weekly Monero Missives. A quick summary of the ongoing work would be: