I'm really happy to read all this! I've been wondering if and how I could contribute to Condenser, as you said it needs more love. It's good to hear an actual development team is working on a new version!
Are you guys planning on accepting contributions from outside developers like me? And can you share already what stack you'll be using?
Condenser is entirely open source and we accept pull requests. https://github.com/steemit/condenser
The readme was recently updated to help developers get up and running easily, check it out.
Also, check with @sneak before designing something in-depth to make sure it's acceptable.