Antagonist here.
I'm one of the admin devs of Pulsar. I keep up with what is going on, tho its been a while since I've had time to commit anything. Still, I'm more than willing to do some admin work for my beloved project so if anyone wants to take a look at the code and/or help out, they are more than welcome to PM me their details (github account and skype name) and I can add them.
The main reason for this project existing is that Steve has decided to continue with his VB6 codebase. While he has managed amazing things with it, the majority of the speed issues and bugs with Aurora can be directly blamed on the VB+Access DB combo he currently uses. He has stated that he will one day start work on Aurora 2 in C#, but who knows when this will be. That is where we come in, trying to get something decent in a little earlier. We have Steve's blessing and encouragement to do this.
As mentioned, this project is in C#, which has been interesting so far. We are aiming for cross-platform compatibility which means this should target windows, linux and mac. We've attemped UI design in winforms as well as GTK# and I can't say I'm happy with either libraries. Anyone with applicable UI experience is more than welcome to apply since the last person responsible for it went dark. I do agree though that the UI is going to be one of the more important parts of a game like this to avoid the usability issues both DF and Aurora suffers.