Biggest problems are stability ofcourse. IMO players will return and, most importantly, stay if that is fixed. Next in line are the bugs and also support still has a way to go to be rated "good". The Dev's focus mainly on stability and large bugs. We've tried to put a timeline on those but that didn't work out. Deadlines couldn't be reached because the size and difficulty has been underestimated (by the dev's themselves). Increasing playerbase is mainly done by hosting events and boosting blitzes in any way possible. 

I try to communicate anything worthy. It's not always easy to decide wether to publish information or not as I do not want to make promises we are not able to keep and do not want to give hope if there is even a slight chance it won't work. 

Regarding to your last alinea, I think the broken code needs to be fixed first before we want to achieve rising population. 

Also sorry for a 6 day delay in answer, hadn't had time to check in due to christmas and family.

New players are not coming in and staying. No Blitz and Skirmish rooms. You need to do something more to get the player base up. I certainly would not play if all I could do was AA or ASW for a month and get Blasted by BB5's over and over at the end of a game.