Certainly there's a lack of excitement in the community at the moment, but work is still underway in the Mer project to support the N810 (and others) and remember these are old devices now, the N810 wasn't much different to the N800 in hardware terms (which defines the sorts of software that can be targeted) and people had that more than 2 and a half years ago.

People are also sitting and waiting for the new hw (and releasing packages for it), which tends to stop work in general (waiting to see if they want the new hw, if they can afford it, etc.), but there's no reason to think it won't pick up again, especially if we have some challenging goals for the devs (OpenGL, audio driver in ARM kernel, re-implementing gpsdriver).

Just my thoughts on the subject