Given Lua's age and use in so many projects, I was under the impression that it was somewhat stable.

Basically, my interest in Lua is this: I'd like to build a personal computing environment that is oriented towards end-user empowerment the way I remember them being in the pre-web era. To that end, employing a relatively simple interpreted language to build as much of the environment as possible is desired such that the end user is able to read and modify large portions of it, as well as create their own tools. Something on the level of Visual Basic or HyperCard would be useful for the GUI portions, and Lua is popular enough to have a lot of learning resources available, so it was an option I was considering.