I would suppose that Haiku developers slowly change their focus from developing the OS to developing the applications for it. And this is a sign that Haiku becomes a stable and attractive platform for application developers. Or in other words, Haiku matures as OS.
Another idea is this month (and this year) we were witnesses of great development outside of Haiku tree, which already is done, but not yet landed to source tree. And this is again a great news if interpreted correctly. This means Haiku is sufficiently important project to create separate repositories and experiment with the code outside of Haiku tree. In other words, this is a sign of Haiku development decentralization. Without judging if this is a good or bad thing, this clearly means Haiku is large and interesting platform for developers.