Who cares if it "feels" like a dead project? I know it's not dead, I don't care what it feels like.
I don't use software for the feeling of being up to date on the cutting edge, I use it because it suits my needs.
Turns out ST wasn’t actually a dead project, although it seemed like it. The ST team probably lost more users than just me from not communicating.
I am glad to pay for software that doesn't keep me on the run like a treadmill. It is possible for software as simple as a text editor to be "finished".
Really excited about ST4, looks like a major upgrade!
I like VSCode, and I use it for a lot of IDE-like stuff. But for normal reading and writing code? I use Sublime Text. Sublime Text is so much faster and more fluid, and able to handle much larger files, and has a better set of text editing tricks in my opinion. And that is worth enough to me that I wouldn't trade it for being able to do everything in one editor.
Sublime + plugins has "enough" features that I only switch when I really need to. And while I can't put my finger on exactly why I feel this way, text just seems to look more pleasant than on other editors, even when using the same fonts and similar color schemes.
As an end user: that model doesn’t work for me at all. Most other apps I use get regular feature and bugfix updates and I admit that I’m spoiled by those regular updates. That ST2 went so very long between releases made it feel like a dead project. Even if behind the scenes it was still active and healthy, I didn’t see that and couldn’t tell the difference between “actively developed, thriving project that just doesn’t release often” and “developer woke up one month and thought ‘hey, I should close a feature request or two this quarter’”.
Again, I’m definitely not arguing that you’re not hard at work on it. I mean this in the spirit of feedback: as an end user who wasn’t active in the plugin developer forums, I didn’t realize anyone was still working on it full-time. And because of that, I stopped using ST because it felt like it was a dead end and I wanted to put my mental resources toward learning and using something still alive and thriving.