These  are all my opinions, of course.


>
> The lack of proper end user documentation is one of the main problems
> with ConTeXt.

Eventually, actually one of the main problems is the lack of
people like Wolfgang  Schuster .
For sure the things can be better if everyone uses  the wiki to search and
update documentations
or write solutions.

There was talk of a book about ConTeXt but I haven't
> heard about that one for a while. Probably impossible given the lack
> of stability (aka ongoing development) of ConTeXt.
>
mkii is not so instable.
mkiv is under active development,
but I'm using it for a catalog from  october of last year.

>
> ConTeXt could become very popular in teh TeX world if it had:
> - A decent versioning support (where you can get documentation and
> code that match and not code from 2008 with documentation from 2001)
> - Side-by-side development of manuals and code
>
More or less, TeX and Latext suffer of the same problem.


> As it is  now, the developing community is restricted to the few gurus
> who can hack the ConTeXt source code.

>From what I know,
the developer of ConTeXt  is Hans Hagen.
There are some texnicians
who help in debuggings; there are some people (wolfgang,mojca, aditja,...)
who know context better than others and offers their support
on the mailing list (we also need more people like them) .
BTW, we are lucky
that developing is firmly on the hands of Hans.



No other sane person will try to
> release and support something on such a volatile foundation.

It's no true.


What
> ConTeXt looks to me currently, is a personal swiss army knife of a few
> people who have no need for end user documentation (so it never
> arrives).

ConTeXt/mkiv actually is the most advanced macro_packages_system build on
top of luatex,
the successor of pdftex; it's a serious competitor in the world of
typesetting systems.
With lua build in, will attract more 'traditional' programmers than
tex/latex/pdftex etc.
It's an ongoing process of development, because it's not easy to develop
luatex-mplib-mkiv
in synch (and taco is another giant )
It can be true that actually context is hard to learn, but I don't think
that this is the right moment for a book.


And to be clear: without luatex, TeX will not survive.

Only my 1cent.

-- 
luigi