I can give some insight on BOOM - Chris Celio, the grad student who built BOOM, recently graduated, but there are some new students now who are picking up on the effort. Expect to see more work on BOOM in the coming year.

More recently, we've integrated it into our FPGA simulation flow, FireSim: https://github.com/firesim/firesim

You can see BOOM doing some "real stuff" here and spin up your own (on an FPGA on EC2 F1): https://fires.im/2018/08/19/firesim-1.3.1-with-BOOM-support....