I get the feelings threads in this forum never stay on topic for longer than a few pages.
Not that there's much official news so far.Anyway, here are some ideas (some more realistic than others) i'll toy with once there's a release:
- Adding additional rendermodes (strobe, jitter, rotation or proximity based fade)
- Allow parallax shift on any layer, maybe remove 13 layer restriction.
- Allow music sound file references outside of aquaria/mus/ and make the ".ogg" postfix optional (since the game can actually load mp3s as music if you append the ".ogg" postfix)
- Allow wildcards in music or tile references to randomly select a match
- optional inclusion of tileset in level.xml (?)
- raise hair-entity attach limit above 1
- Improve Mod selection UI
Don't hold your breath though, i'm up to my ears in other work.

If nothing else the Source Code allows us to finally find all those hidden undocumented editor features like "f" to write in hieroglyphs.