Has Kent hinted anywhere if he’s planning to put out a new version of Hugo? I’m curious - it’s nearly 2 years since he last posted a new version - either he’s really busy with other projects or…something else.
Judging from his occasional posts at Jolt Country, it looks like he’s still interested in IF.
Not that I’m aware of. It’s probably just a matter of other things (not Hugo-related) being more important – or something. 
Robb Sherwin and I have posted about a few minor bugs (mostly in the library) to Jolt Country, but nothing major. Probably, there just isn’t a lot to be done on it.
Still no word from Kent regarding Hugo? I asked the same question 2 years ago… 
Nothing that I’m aware of.
Quite a bit of what could be done to further and improve Hugo could be done by others. I’d like to see:
Either a browser-based or plugin-based (Java, Flash, Silverlight?) interpreter for Hugo, probably as a GLK implementation.
An updated standard library. The library has a few cool tricks built in, but there is a lot more it could do. I’ve posted code snippets for handling “*” as a transcript character (complete with confirmations) – something good for the library. I’ve expanded and added quite a few verbs/commands in prior games, that if generalized might really improve the standard library. I’d like a standard option for changing the indention behavior to use blank lines between paragraphs instead of spaces at the beginning of a paragraph’s first line (something I had to sort of “hack” into things for The Traveling Swordsman).
From there, Hugo could support the same sort of extensions community that Inform and TADS do. For instance, I wrote this thing called “Cool-Menu” which shows up late in Distress but was going to be used as an opening menu for some future games. Never released it - although it’s there in the Distress source code. The problem is, too few people use Hugo, because they feel the others are bigger, better, and more supported. But since too few people use it, not many are around to support it or make it bigger and better. Speaking for myself, I’ve generally been more interested in writing games than releasing extensions or a custom base library, and even that urge has subsided the last couple of years.
I agree with most of what you said…especially the browser-based version of the Hugo Runtime. I’ve been thinking a few months ago if I could ask a friend of mine at work to create a Java port of Hugo, even if I have to shell out a few bucks.
I’m really just concerned about having Hugo catch up with the “competition,” so to speak. There’s a lot of things going on with the other systems that I’d like to see in Hugo, or at least see what else Kent had in mind. But you’re right, there’s just not enough interested users (most are probably dabblers like me 
) to probably push Kent into looking into Hugo after all these years.