Howdy!
News, blog posts, presence on forums etc. are no less than they have ever been (those are my area, so I can confirm that :) )
Extra resources from the merger - well, we have extra financial backing to hire more staff, but finding those staff is the same challenge it has always been, something we've spoken about many times before. We need to have great people, not just "someone to fill a role". If you've followed the information on that over the last few years, you'll know that Prague has an extraordinarily high rate of employment/low number of folks unemployed, which means few people looking for a job. And as I say, we are very picky :)
Extra resources was never going to be Corona programmers writing V-Ray code or vice versa. So, that hasn't been slowing us, but also, neither does that speed us up. As has been said from the date of the merger, both teams retain their independence.
The roadmap always comes down to it being Tentative. Either we can share what we are planning and thinking (with the risk that then of course it may change - dates may change, what features turn out to be possible may change), or we can remove it and stay silent and leave everyone in the dark until things emerge in the daily build. Both have their drawbacks, we go with the sharing as much info as we can, with the risk that then people will get annoyed when features are removed or dates slip. We accept that will cause some people some frustration, but we've decided that's less of an issue than keeping quiet. We renamed it Tentative as a result of the last round of discussion about that, but we won't be removing it, we believe in sharing what we can when we can.
We do want to give a stable release. It's been a big one, with lots of things in it, lots of new challenges, and to be honest we don't want to get into some "crazy crunch culture" like seen in, say, the video game industry. We'd rather our developers were fresh, well-rested, etc. and able to do their best job, rather than run ragged trying to meet a specific date. Of course we DO try and hit that date, and we do try and pick dates that we think we can meet, but software development is full of unforeseens, so all we can do is update that once we have what we believe to be stable new information. At the end of the day though, if something needs to take longer to get it working/working properly, then it will take longer. The other option would be to cut features, but we try to avoid that too.
Of course we don't want to delay and would love to hit the estimated dates, but all the above factors in to whether dates slip etc.
Hope this helps some!
Thanks!