As many readers will know, I’m a member of the two-man team in charge of maintaining the beamer class (the other team member is Vedran Miletić). Vedran and I took over looking after beamer when it was unmaintained and some important bugs cropped up: lots of people rely on it, so fixes were important. There was a question on the TeX Stackexchange site recently asking about the status of maintenance. It’s a tricky one to tackle in a Q&A, but it does make a good topic for the blog!
Vedran and I are committed to keeping beamer working, and that means fixing bugs as and when we can. At the same time, we are not likely to add much in the way of new feature: small changes over time only. There are a few reasons for that, the single biggest one of which is stability. The beamer class is very widely used, and does a lot of stuff. Making significant changes is therefore tricky, particularly as we don’t have any automated tests. The internal beamer structure contributes a bit here: it’s a complex set up, partly due to some issues in LaTeX2e (why I work on LaTeX3), partly because it has to be and partly as an ‘overhaul’ might have been useful at some stage. (It’s far too late for the latter idea now: any big change would break too many documents.)
The second issue is of course time: both Vedran and I are busy, in my case not only with ‘real life’ but also with other (La)TeX projects! Then of course there is trying to stick to what beamer does: the original design quite deliberately doesn’t do some things, so as ‘auto-flowing’ text.
If you watch the BitBucket site for beamer development, you will see changes, both to fix bugs and (slowly) add new features. That’s not about to change: small changes, ‘little and (relatively) often’, are the order of the day here. Of course, if you have a patch you really want applying, we are always happy to take a look!