To once again address few topics raised here:
Corona development independence: Corona is part of Chaos and directed by me. We entered into the contract with general understanding of common goals, and as a result I never since received any significant pushback to my vision. So the only thing that changed is that you need to trust Chaos, not Render Legion.
Corona roadmap reliability: the roadmap is not set in stone, because development is tricky business. Please read this disclaimer:
https://trello.com/c/j5AVQ4oX/197-important-road-map-information-please-read before relying on anything on the road map.
Development speed in general: We are still implementing features as fast as possible. with constraints of general lack of renderer developers, challenges of working in a large codebase, etc. There are no artificial limits e.g. in funding. Unfortunately you need to accept that Corona is now a mature software product and its development will never be as fast as in the very beginning. This is how all software works. Easy to add features were already added, we have large userbase that encounters more bugs and produces more feature requests than ever before, and we need to maintain the already added code. With more developers we are in fact adding features faster than in the past, they are just spread thinner across the vast number of feature requests.
Picking features to implement: we wrote about this here:
https://blog.corona-renderer.com/behind-the-scenes-the-corona-renderer-development-process/Innovation in v7: we added missing items to the trello roadmap to clarify what is new:
https://trello.com/b/EfPE4kPx/corona-tentative-road-map-3ds-max. I still want to add more info on the speedups, because some are huge (50%). Overall v7 is large release centered around PBR and the related infrastructure and shading changes.
Moving tonemapping to v8: We did massive amount of work during development cycle of v7 to make the tone mapping modular (which allows faster, more flexible pipeline, with more tone mapping operators). Unfortunately there were some unforseen problems and we had to move it to future release to avoid bugs or release delay. This does not mean the work is lost - we now have head start for v8, the feature will be released early in the release cycle, and in 1 year there will be no difference between releasing this in v7 or v8. We will soon show video with prototype to give you sneak peek.