I don't have very specific details as I'm a bystander too but it seems Node has been stuck in 0.10.x land since early 2013 (http://blog.nodejs.org/2013/03/11/node-v0-10-0-stable/) while Node 0.12 and 1.0 releases were being talked about well over a year ago by former BDFL Isaac Schlueter (now at npm). Joyent, the current project stewards, have not been able to deliver a stable release in that time and don't share public plans / aren't communicating very much.

One of the many symptoms of that slow development process is that Node.js is basically running an unsupported version of V8 (https://twitter.com/jmayer/status/532971494695907328).

From what I've read, node-forward is/was only meant as a fork in the GitHub sense: they'd try to get their stuff merged back into node mainline. The GitHub fork has since been made private (https://github.com/node-forward/discussions/issues/7) and they're working to set up a proper governance model so that the community can truly be in charge. Joyent has reacted (I believe, it might have been in the works prior to node-forward) by proposing a node advisory board (https://github.com/joyent/nodejs-advisory-board) but it seems to be too little too late for at least some of the people behind node-forward (I've read what seem like irreconcilable disagreements about how it should be run).

I have no idea what (if anything) io.js is in relation to node-forward or if the same people are behind it. Can't find any announcements / endorsements on Twitter, so maybe it was just posted here before whoever is behind it were ready to go live.