He was correct about the lack of movement on key systems in the game being an issue.[/quote]
Wow, that’s… really generic. So generic as to be pointless, no matter what level of development there is, you could always say that development could be faster.
What is your metric for how fast things are developed? How long do you think it would take to fully overhaul NPCs and implement working factions? Please fully support your numbers with a proposed design.
That’s quite a jump there, from “my pet set of features isn’t being worked on”, to, “the project appears stagnant”. You need a bit more to back up a claim like that than a bare assertion.
This is your opinion, and you’re wrong 
I can’t argue with this, this is the crux of the matter. No one wants to work on NPCs. Out of the 200+ developers that have contributed to DDA over the past year, not a single one has had the time, interest, and talent necessary to make NPCs happen, much less factions etc. You seem to look at this fact and see some kind of moral failing, whereas I see it as an indicator of how incredibly difficult overhauling the entire NPC system would be. I think part of this is the fact that everyone qualified to actually do the work knows how much work it would be, we’re talking weeks, if not months of sustained effort to implement, and no one has decided yet that the payoff is worth the effort. Meanwhile we keep chipping away at the things in the codebase that make it so painful, and eventually the effort required will drop to below some threshold for somebody, and it’ll happen.
In a way I agree with you. I guess if NPCs were the one killer feature it’d look different, but there is a ton of cool stuff being added all the time.