They took a long break from them after 1.1, the first version was finished. They started again recently in preparation for the 2.0 release, which will hopefully be sometime next year.
As for RAM, anyone trying to sell you on faster RAM is a snake oil peddler.
Quite to the contrary. Factorio benefits even more from memory speed than CPU speed.
Claims of faster RAM being a significant benefit is and always will be snake oil, unless you have very specific needs and you know what you're doing (no, Factorio usually doesn't fall under this).
For most people, you get faster RAM after you've maxed out everything else and there's nothing left to possibly improve. Because most of the benefit will be in the form of Johnson Stroking than actual performance.