my case:
due to running low on compelling ideas for my game project (anything worthwhile to do or implement recently), and basically running out of worthwhile stuff to do with my video codec stuff (it basically achieves its initial goals), recently (due to feeling like doing so) went and wrote a software rasterizer exporting the OpenGL API (a 1.3 subset).
still can't pull off non-crap framerates at higher resolutions (ex: 1440x900) with everything enabled when running Quake 3 Arena on it (generally goes a lot faster with Quake 2 though, and is basically playable with Q3A at 1024x768 and/or with some rendering features disabled).
tried an idea which could theoretically make it somewhat faster, but it killed image quality (made it look about like Doom 2 smeared with excrement).
like, seemingly, even the ninja-fast speeds of modern CPUs aren't really enough to easily run Q3A at higher-resolutions while using software rendering (benchmarks from people with faster CPUs running other SW rasterizers seem to imply that this may be a general problem, vs just my lazy mostly-plain-C rasterizer being slow...).
running Doom 3 in a SW renderer looks like it would be almost impossible...
otherwise, my life now is almost exactly the same as it was 10 years ago.
not sure of much going on in the forums though...
ADD: ... those threads... LOLZ...