Thanks! I try to be approachable even when I'm not feeling like it. Brent Simmons really believes in community and kindness. I do my best not to let him down.
Brent is very much still active. He is the Founder, Project Manager, Product Manager, Release Manager, and much more for NetNewsWire. He just doesn’t have enough spare time to code as much as he would like.
I’m not sure I would consider that a red flag for this particular project. Both RSS and NetNewsWire are very mature, they’ve been around for about twenty years.
I suspect you may know this, but for the sake of others reading the comments, this "version" of NetNewsWire started from the original developer of NetNewsWire (Brent Simmons). NetNewsWire had passed through two other owners and the final owner (BlackPixel) returned the brand back to Brent Simmons who had already started a new, open source RSS reader which has since been known as NetNewsWire 5 (but doesn't share code with the previous versions).