I think we need to see more updates here on BTCTalk. I don't particularly feel like having to return to IRC in the hope that I'll see updates instead of devs and other community figures flinging shit at each other and generally acting like children all over again.
I like to say cats are not herd animals, and the result is we are having a catfight on how to best fix the difficulty adjustments. I had hoped that with the low market cap that making some fundamental changes to the reward structure and denial-of-service defense code would be easier. But it's not, and as far as I can tell my only option now is post the code, and let the users and miners decide.
The result seems to be a lot like when Martin Luther raised criticisms of the Catholic Church and was exocommunicated, or when Edward Snowden released some embarrassing information and was called a traitor for it. Instead of fixing anything, there is FUD and namecalling, and this is repeating the same nonsense we had 6 months ago.
When I originally advocated for #catcoin-dev, there was so much noise from FUD and basically catfighting it was impossible to get anything done here. Now it's impossible to get anything done on IRC, and since I didn't bother to register the channel with freenode. Now the channel has been 51%ed by people who don't write code. There's one other cat-owner who has posted working code, and I respect his opinion, although sometimes we differ. But when we differ, the conversations are generally reasonable and grown-up. What I would like to see is a forum (IRC or otherwise), and to be a moderator, you have to point to the code you've released.
Or we do like a distributed system probably should and have multiple implementations instead of one code to rule them all. The problem is that puts more responsibility on the end-user to decide which code to run.