Good on you Peter for sticking with it all these years. Your avatar's appropriate; you're definitely the captain of the (admittedly lonely) ship. I wish I could've done more to push the editors forward and stuck around longer as an active member of the steering committee but real life got in the way. Hopefully the stuff I dumped on
https://github.com/chaigler/t2d_editors helped somebody.
As for the engine, it's been an uphill battle for a long time now. GarageGames failing so soon after the engine was released, Melv departing for Unity, and then Michael Perry abandoning ship shortly after were big blows to the community. The lack of editors, outdated fixed function renderer, etc. didn't help either. It would've been nice if some of the work they did on 3 Step Studio could've been rolled back to T2D, just having some of those editors would've went a long way toward attracting more people to the engine.
I do think there's still a niche T2D can fill, though. I'm not particularly happy with the direction Godot took with 3.0 (the push to GLES3 and the latest-and-greatest rendering came at the cost of performance and compatibility and the engine is worse off in some ways than it was in 2.x). I have to believe there's a place in the world for an opensource, lean-and-clean 2D engine but the amount of competition out there is absurd and attracting users that will actively support the project is insanely difficult.
I would say it might be worth your time discussing things with Jeff and co. There was some talk a while back about leveraging T2D's clean codebase for T3D. Maybe there's an opportunity to leverage something from T3D in return? I've always thought the ideal situation would be a hybrid, Franken-engine pairing T2D's 2D abilities with T3D's more modern renderer but that's an improbable dream at this point.