Nevcairiel (LAV filters) is Hendrik on this board, and was just hired on full time by JRiver as a developer for MC. I can only assume that his vast knowledge about video processing will yield positive results in MC. I suspect he'll need a bit more time to really learn the code internals, but he's already contributing good code, so if he gets his mind focused on this, I expect good things. With that said, it's likely a TON of work, and any work spend on that is work not spent on improving MC in other areas, and yields no immediate results, so the users get restless for updates and changes. It's a balancing act.
Also madshi (madVR) is a friend of JRiver and has worked closely with them in the past, and I believe continues to do so to this day. Whether he has any plans on linux support, I can't say for sure, but he himself has said it's a long way off, if ever.
There are plenty of media players for Linux, so there must be some decent renderer out there, even if it needs some tweaking to work well with MC.
Anyway, fingers crossed for speedy development in video. I'm going to try installing MC on Arch in a VM in the next month or 2.