I'm wondering if a remotely operated project could be in the works? Verse allows for remote collaboration, but I have no idea how well it works with Blender at this point. I suspect that a long term Open project using Verse and Blender could spur on development to make remote collaboration closer to reality though.

I think that with the current state of Blender, the next step would be to re-implement a good support with the Verse project...

You know, the last compatibility was, as I remember, for Blender 2.4x.