I just read this blog post about the direction of numpy development, which might be of interest to Sage Developers. TL;DR -- Travis Oliphant explains that he is stepping down as head steward of Numpy, and then explains the awesome new things he's working on instead.
This made me think about my current relationship with the Sage project, where I'm similarly considered "head steward". I have not been super-active in the last few months in day-to-day Sage development, and haven't posted a lot on the lists. However, in my case, this is because I'm doing some hard work to build a company (Salvus) that may be able to provide more sustainable funding for core Sage development later. For example, yesterday, Drew Sutherland and I worked at an approach to implementing computation of q-expansions of higher weight modular forms (using modular symbols) which would be much, much faster than what's in Sage (or Magma) now. I'm not implementing it today, because I'm working on Salvus instead, so that hopefully in a year I will have all the time I need to implement exactly that algorithm and more in Sage, as a result of what I'm doing now. (Drew will implement a special case he needs for his research.)