The wheels don't always turn as quickly as we would like them to (that's true for all of us)... but they DO turn.
We're actually chatting with a couple of folks about their involvement in the project... and are close to announcing a new lead.
Actually, there has also been a pretty fair amount of discussion about how to improve this situation long term as well as create some new opportunities. The general consensus is to decouple the AD provider and (in fact) re-architect the whole area to accommodate a more general "authentication provider" which would better support AD (by allowing multiple AD provider projects, since everyone wants it to work differently *grin*) and/or support other authentication methods like LDAP, OpenID, CardSpace, etc. Be advised, this is not a short term solution... but I suspect will have sufficient support to be accomplished this year... and a couple of authentication projects to go along with it.
In the meantime, we will work closely with a new lead for the "AD Project". We need to. Because in its current architecture it will have to release along with core upgrades. So when we announce a new team lead... please do two things:
1) Take it easy on him/her... they'll be new to the team, the process and the inevitable bottlenecks that occur when working with a new team...
2) Crystallize your thinking and provide some documented requirements. There's a lot of things that could/can be changed, but we'll need to prioritize them and be able to adequately test.
Hang in there... give it a few more days.