I originally forked gEDA/PCB back in 2013. For 2 years it was mostly a private fork. Then I figured the official version is dead and my fork is the only live alternative so I started to "advertise" it. There were still some gEDA/PCB developers around, so I made sure they understood that I tried to minimize my code changes so merging would be easy.
I even started to lobby for merging one very small, but essential patch (estimated cost of merge: 15 minutes) about file format compatibility. While there was no explicit refusal (there's no explicit anything ever in gEDA), nothing really happened for years.
Between 2015 and 2016 I was weakly lobbying for a collaboration between pcb-rnd and gEDA and gEDA/PCB - but all attempts failed.
Later on there was discussion on #geda about the future of gEDA/PCB. After that Bert had to decide whether pcb joins pcb-rnd and the combined project becomes the new pcb tool in gEDA. After many weeks of no news, I finally declared that no decisions really means no to this idea just gEDA can't state anything explicitly. So I did state it.
That was the point when I stopped caring about diverging from pcb and "how things would be merged" and started doing the bigger infrastructural changes more freely. This gave pcb-rnd a boost. It also practically closed any path of a merge (both code-wise and project-management-wise), because of the magnitude of changes. I also started to actively do project management on pcb-rnd: unprecedented in gEDA history, pcb-rnd started to have predictable releases. Other oddities compared to rest of gEDA: bugs got fixed, contribution not forgotten and bitrotting and we started to grow an active, contributing community. Also unusual to gEDA, we did and we still do generate over 10 kilobytes of relevant traffic on IRC every single day.
A year later, late 2017, seeing how far pcb-rnd got and how gEDA didn't have much progress, I proposed a different kind of collaboration: to form a group of project leaders to coordinate the gEDA effort. This offer didn't contain any detail about any of the project, just that we should set up a project leader mailing list and invest some time in developing features that connect our software in ways users are requesting. It got refused, which clearly showed that gEDA project leaders were not interested in any kind of collaboration even within gEDA and didn't see beyond the boundary of their own little (mostly frozen) kingdom.
After that I waited another year. During that period pcb-rnd grew a lot while there was very little progress within gEDA. It was clear that gEDA was in hibernation. So I had a last attempt, a final proposal to gEDA leaders on this topic, describing why gEDA's approach is failing, referencing to previous attempts and a proposal how to fix things introducing gEDA 2.0. It was rejected with large majority.
I kept reading the gEDA mailing list for one more year, but unsubscribed in early 2019 after I got feedback from multiple sources that my pcb-rnd presence was too bold.
My conclusion is:
(As of 2024 it's dead in the nobody cares sense too.)
Or in short: gEDA is in a deadlock and can not be fixed.
As years pass by, it's becoming not worth fixing either, it's better to start new efforts from scratch so that they don't have to carry on the old design errors and those people who developed power in the gEDA community but ended up (often unintendedly) blocking the way forward.