The growth of their development fund has reached over $120K in monthly contributions, allowing them to have 20 full time programming staff. Plus, every year, they take advantage of the Google Summer of Code to get up to 6 other programmers on board to work on focused, 12 week projects which Google pays for. The projects don't always end up being high enough quality that they make it into the finished codebase, but more and more, they are. This year's GSOC just wrapped up and will hopefully be bringing, amongst other things, a much more customizable menu editing system, a new faster and more accurate cloth/soft body solver, lots more improvements to their Scene Outliner (the same programmer who improved it during GSOC last year returned for another go around this year), a much faster OBJ importer (with the developer planning to stick around to implement additional formats they weren't able to get to).
Much like with TG, I lurk and have been following the development for the past seven years or so. They're cooking with some serious gas ...
They've also really managed to activate their core field and - with the 2.8x UI overhaul - generate some serious interest in the wider field. The majority of their $120K monthly income comes in the form of donations/grants from corporations - nVidia, AMD, MS, Intel, Epic Games, Unreal, Unity, etc. - so other companies in the field are really investing in the future of the platform.
Some people are doing some really nice environmental work as well - architecture, post-apocalyptic, landscape. I've often wondered if it might unseat/supplant TG for many people as it has such a broad range of capabilities and they've recently been working on OpenVBD support as well as new sky models.
They're looking pretty solid!
