It´s official: the next Exult stable version will be out soon after Duke Nukem Forever. Jokes aside here´s what´s been done to the development version in the past 15 months:

Unlimited NPCs (Marzo)
Smooth Scrolling (Ryan)
Vast improvements to the Exult toolchain (usecode compiler, ExultStudio, etc) (Marzo)
Most data is now non-hardcoded but read from datafiles (Marzo)
A lot of data from the originals has been decoded and combat should work a lot closer to the originals now (Marzo)
Tons of fixes (Jeff, Marzo, Willem, Ryan, Phillip)