last I heard this project lost its dev, correct me if Im wrong.

Astute observation. Have you, or do you know of others who tried to contact dev directly?

I agree, communication from the dev is as good as non-existent. Still, RAIN has a lot of potential. The white paper you mention is a draft version and does need quite some work. But that is what draft versions are: work in progress. Besides being unfinished, the white paper also lists some great real-life use features connected to the RAIN coin.

I believe Condensate RAIN is a high quality coin with firm, long-term value. All it lacks is community support (and, perhaps, a dev who is willing to accept helping hands)

any update on the whitepaper regarding the release date?

I am mining! Found blocks have to mature before they are disbursed as a reward, and it is done by confirmations. The dev's of this team rented much hash-power to expedite us to block 63,900. Much of this hashpower was pointed to sexypool so that pool was finding many more blocks then typical and blocks where being found on average every 300 seconds. So blocks matured much faster in the couple of days leading up to the fork, so rewards were paid more frequently as well. Now we have forked the network hash rate is back down where it normally is and the updates are slowly bringing the difficulty down where it should be to see targeted 90s blocktimes, but it will take time.  

The difficulty has been steadily decreasing, so it is a successful update!

http://dbix.litwiller.us/diff.PNG