This is really great information @maitland, and more importantly it's great to get some transparency behind the team working on SteemIt.com as well as the rest of the Steem platform.
Currently one of the biggest drawbacks to Steem (in my opinion) is a lack of a clear roadmap / timeline / transparency about the plans for the future and the work being done.
Are you and Ben SteemIt, Inc employees, or are you contractors, or how does that work? I would really appreciate any information you can share on this subject.
Also I think I can speak for the entire Steem community when I say THANK YOU for all of the work you are doing and for making a post like this with great information for other developers to create their own sites and services on top of the Steem blockchain!
the team has been busy on a bunch of different projects; for a peek into what might be coming up you can browse https://github.com/steemit/ and take a look at each project's issue queue -- you might find some exciting stuff ;)
the team will be writing more posts like this one to document our work & let everyone know what's going into the codebase's development. thanks for reading!