It’s nothing new that the Renoise devs don’t tell much about upcoming releases, it has always been so as far as i can remember. I believe they don’t want too high expectations on something that they can’t deliver. Let’s say if they told everyone they were working on a piano roll, but then suddenly realised it wasn’t doable the way they thought, then when piano roll is missing from the release all hell will break loose and people will whine about what was “promised”.
Like you said, it’s a small niche product. How can you expect a small crew to deal with all the suggestions they’re bombarded with? And then the bug fixes, the testing and all the complex code challenges that follows a large project like Renoise. I don’t know anything about coding really, but i remember how much code i had to write to get a very poorly animated bouncing ball on my C64, so i get a headache just to think about something like this.
Be patient, work around it in the meanwhile. 