Where can I find status of Monero development? Things like:
1) How many "core" devs are working on it, and who they are (handles, plus real-names/social-media where public)?
2) Roughly how much time per week/month these devs are spending on it.
3) What the dev roadmap is.
4) What the dev roadmap *was*, and were the milestones hit on-target.
^ You know, basic project management stuff. Looking at git commits only gives hints as to most of this.
pa's answer was pretty helpful on 1, 3, and 4. 4 may be a bit unsatisfying (I find it so) but given that we have to work with very unpredictable resources it is difficult to ever have timed milestones. So we never have and can't measure against them. That's just how it is.
As far as 2, it isn't formally tracked, but it's a reasonably significant amount of time for a mostly-unfunded open source project when you combine across the core team, the major development contributors, and the research group.
I would estimate very roughly 2-3 full time equivalents (varies somewhat unpredictably over time though), and by that I mean just software development and testing, and work on research reports, not the work we put into communications, third party support, etc.
Smooth - would you estimate that the bolded part is still roughly accurate?
Yes I would say that is roughly accurate. There may be slightly less now, but I'm not positive of that because the effort is a bit more diffuse and some major in-progress work may not be so visible. For example, I really had no idea the amazing scope of Noodle Doodle's benchmarking, debugging, and optimizing effort until his recent commit (though I did know he was working on it).
There has been a bunch of work from the MRL on various crypto things including: strengthening anonymization both against combinatorial attacks and better hiding of amounts along the lines of Blockstream's CT, continued analysis of the problem of difficulty retargeting, and upgraded python implementations of more of the crypto.
On the C++ coding side we have NoodleDoodle's massive effort of course. MoneroMooo has been contributing more as well, mostly on a various wallet things (and his work will be now be funded for several months via the forum crowdfunding system), and let's not forget luigi1111's great work to define and implement integrated addresses. I know oranjuice is continuing to work on the API upgrade. I don't see commits (possibly I'm looking the wrong place) for it but he is regularly on #monero-dev discussing it.
So it is interesting that some people who previously put in a lot more work have been busy with other things and putting in less time recently, but others are now contributing to the development effort, and the overall effort fairly stable (that is also visible in the commit rate over the past 6-9 months, although that is an imperfect measure and doesn't include some things at all, such as most of the MRL work).
