There has been a long, ongoing discussion on Nexus Forums and there are some interesting recent posts. In particular, a post by schlangster (one of the original SKSE developers) posted today:
Ok, to shed a bit of light on the current situation, here's a brief overview of the people that were involved with SKSE and their roles:
Ian builds the core infrastructure and decodes the fundamental game systems. Most of his work happens when the game is released. He is the essential developer behind the script extender, but as you would expect from a person that skilled, he has a job and very little time. He sticks around to do the game updates and packages releases, but he doesn't have the time to do all the grunt work that comes with adding high-level features.
Behippo handles decoding the game classes (that's lots of tedious work) and adding core script functions. He is a busy guy, too, so most of his work happens after release (at least for SKSE it was like that).
These guys do the groundwork, but they do not create mods themselves (or even play the game extensively). This makes it harder for them to come up with actual script functions to add.
The people best suited to do that part are the ones who have mods that require those functions. They know which functions and parameters they need and they have the mod set up the actually test those functions themselves, tweak them, etc. And that's how it should be IMO. We cannot expect two people who have been around for 10+ years to still do all the work. It needs people from the current generation of modders to step and contribute.
For SKSE, these roles were filled by Brendan and me. Event-based input, Papyrus-ActionScript communication, mod events, the extending Equip functions, serialization, etc. - those were things I needed for SkyUI, they did not exist yet, so I added them. I was a student at the time, so I had lots of free time and I was highly motivated. Same goes for Brendan, he added even more stuff for RaceMenu (I would list it, but I don't know the details).
In summary, it was two devs for the foundations, and two for the high-level features (though these roles are generally flexible). A good mix of people with experience but little time and vice versa.
SKSE64 development worked pretty much the same so far. Ian and behippo did their thing, the foundations are more or less done. But Brendan currently focuses on F4SE as I understand and I am no longer active now (that was clear from the start). Behippo had planned to take on the task of porting the functionality required for SkyUI as you know, but so far that did not happen. It doesn't surprise me at all, because I know that if I had to do it all over again, except with the drastically reduced amount of time I have now, I would not have been able to either. Porting existing functions is a bit less work than starting from scratch, but he still has to figure out many things for the first time because he did not originally add all of them.
So at the moment, there's not much going on. What could happen eventually:
- Brendan moves on to SKSE64.
- Behippo returns.
- I return to port SkyUI (and the required functions in the process).
- Ian gets mad and decides to do everything by himself in one hour.
- Others decide to get involved and help.
But don't count on it, and do not assume any release schedule.
