For what it's worth, I did speak with @scipio lately (about 2 weeks ago) and he told me he was working on improvements to Steem-UA. I agree with you that I wish that there was more visible activity and improvements happening.
As far as your large rank drop, I don't know, perhaps a large UA person unfollowed you?
Edit: Annnd holy crap I just noticed I somehow jumped to position 19. No idea how that happened.
I don't worry much about the drop as others are going up at the same time etc and the rep doesn't really worry me overall. Hopefully the project progresses and improves as I think there is benefit in it but, not if it gets passively forgotten.
I think the bankers have taken over the algorithm ;P Hope you are doing well mate.
I'm still here ;-) Have been every day (on Discord)
And yes, the "rank jumpings" has a lot to do with @utopian-io announcing quitting its witness activities. As it is a top witness, that causes an immense "re-shuffling" of UA values flowing from its position.
UA is not a black box since months: it's Open Sourced, and anybody is able to check & validate the data from the source
ok. interesting as I don't really have much to do with Utopian-io at all while some of those that do seem to have gone up a lot in position. weird.
I know it is open source but, not open without the skillset available to understand it :D
I understand, the volume of UA computations and variables is huge and very difficult (for @holger80 and myself as well!) to fully "grasp" / comprehend.
So to not get into too much details: the @utopian-io witness change, also means other witnesses moved up the ladder, which makes other people do so as well. We're talking about ~ 1.4 trillion EigenValues; comple shizzle ;-)
Yep, it is all pretty interesting and I hope it goes somewhere further :)