Here's a new thread to discuss. In general, as Tom said, we need a champion that is going to put in the massive effort to do one of the major items of interest (Gradle, etc). If somebody wants to step up to take on one of these tasks, I don't think others will too strongly object.
There's still plenty of bugs and XMPP compliance issues to work through, so my preference would be to crank out more releases like what was just done with 3.9.2. But I don't write much code, so its up to the nerds moreso than me 
I created the 3.9.3 just to keep the versioning going, not to demand that release. It can always be renamed or moved if necessary.
Your thoughts on 4.0?