What's the current status of the module in terms of development?

After going over different parts of working with new D6 sites and a lot of third party modules I am down into working through the newsletter part. I am trying to use a suite of modules that I felt comfortable with in D5 and it seems that things are not progressing quickly on that front. Simplenews seems to be mature enough, simplenews_template not that much and sending HTML emails appears to be a bit buggy, even though you now have another option (http://drupal.org/project/htmlmail), which I haven't testes yet but I kind of like this one.

I had to go over the code one more time (I did this quite a few times in D5) and noticed that although it seems that a bit of reworking is needed (update to use the new mail api signature (&$message) may help make the code a lot cleaner, and maybe work out over some design decisions, the work involved might not be that much into getting a stable version of this module for D6.

Just wondering of what are the thoughts of the maintainers for this module. Is current development active? Is the module somehow left behind or abandonded? Is there room for helping in a more active way than by submitting patches to the issue queue?

Just thinking out loud for now...