Hey @SGA ,
Shared a longer reply on this topic a couple weeks back on this thread
The accessibility of baking is one of the key differentiators of Tezos Proof-of-Stake. It differentiates us from networks with capped validator sets that make some PoS open only to insiders and, perhaps just as importantly, open participation underpins the Tezos amendment process.
Kiln+Ledger is a big reason for our success in those dimensions so far. There are ~400-450 bakers and about 100 or so bake using Kiln.
Kiln funding has not been cut or deactivated and development has not been stopped. In fact, the opposite is true.
The pace of progress slowed in Q4 2019. Since then, there have been significant engineering efforts underway to make Kiln more accessible to new bakers, easier-to-use for current bakers, and developed as a more sustainable open-source project which has contributions from multiple different development teams.
Certain widely requested features, in particular MacOS support, are being prioritized (in fact we have it working already) and we expect will soon be entering QA.
And a number of other features/improvements are being explored or developed (in no particular order), such as improved UI, support for multiple signing devices (beyond just Ledger), integration with the Tezos Baker Registry, replacing the custom Kiln indexer with multiple options in wider use by the community, monitoring on mobile devices, Windows support, and more. Also, improving the UI based on well-known web frameworks to encourage more open source contribution.
Additionally, we’re interested in exploring baker participation projects based on NFT badges with other ecosystem entities to reward kiln bakers for their participation in helping decentralize Tezos.
