Nosh seems to progress nicely - it just doesn't get a lot of public attention. If you follow the FreeBSD or debian mailing-lists you will find a new email announcement about releases every 3-4 weeks.

Init still seems to be undecided in FreeBSD land; my hope is that FreeBSD 11 or 12 at least makes a decision about considering to switch (or not).

Latest freebsd quarterly update: https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2015-10-2015-12.h...

Latest release notes (jan 14th, 2017): https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2017/01/msg00519.html