Max's work has been great in that a) he has found and fixed bugs that affect Autocad, and gotten those bugfixes into the trunk, and b) he is slowly working his way towards a DIB engine prototype that actually greatly improves speed on some important apps without hurting other apps.
If I recall correctly, previous efforts stalled partly because they didn't actually provide a real speedup. So I'm really glad Max is doing what he's doing, even if it's not destined for the trunk, because he is nevertheless paving the way in some sense. - Dan