It's mania heaven! The maps you don't expect to be ranked in 50 years are ranked on Ripple! That bring me to my next point - osu! ranking system can go suck a dick. Recently Ripple got popular and have been enjoying my time playing on it. Note that was all for osu!std, and am yet do same for mania.
To give an idea of what I have been working on in the past month, I refactored tons of shit like how sliders are constructed and rendered, mod application, optimized beatmap loading, added graphs of various metrics like velocity, tap intervals, etc, and implemented acc based scoring for tapping and aiming. It is almost stable, but lacks any useful features that would allow to analyze replays for cheating and lacks a good gui. It has a bit of a way more to go before it's ready for release. I haven't been lazy, I have been working on it almost everyday (except that month I worked on osu!LAZER stuff). So I went back to working on the osu! Replay Analyzer. I'll go back to LAZER once it's somewhat ready to be worked on without being concerned that the development is not ready for feature X or some other shit. Without knowing the plans, I don't even bother since that will pose more problems down the line imo. That's pretty hard considering I have no idea what their roadmap is. The mentality is not just ask, but do, such that peppu expects for devs to not be needed to be told what to do. The way peppu and smoogipooo are working on osu!LAZER makes it hard to do anything.
However, peppu said that they would want to hold out on major code changes before releasing since it will just delay the release further more. It would require an entire rework of the beatmap and hitobject management systems to get to the point where the gamemodes can be reworked. The way the stuff handling beatmaps and hitobjects is coded made brought me death by cringe. No matter, I decided to do something more productive and took on the task of recoding the entire mania gamemode - only to be met by more disappointments. It kinda made me a bit sad that me and a bunch of other devs who took on the challenge turned out to be gineae pigs for his experiment.
The key counter turned out to be just a trial for peppu to see how well the LAZER stuff works. I think these entries are defaulting to monthly releases instead of weekly, unfortunately.