Eric,
the last clue I saw was that Ted and company were not happy with what they had come up with to date and were taking two steps back and regrouping on the powered indexer.
Also, I believe all their time and effort is going into 2.0 unless they have enough engineers to work both as separate paths.
Hopefully, Ted or one of the other staff will give us an update on all things Handibot soon. I know it is killing me.
BTW, if you don't already, follow the blog, there have been several updates there that didn't get announced here.