It’s just inactive, but stippi will review patches if someone submits some.
It does. Ham is a feature-for-feature rewrite, or at least was started this way. There are a few things that could be improved in jam, but really, building an entire operating system is inherently complex, and no build tool would really solve that entirely. And jam is quite flexible and suitable, even if it’s a bit quirky.
Most of toe difficulties come, I think, not from jam itself (it’s a pretty simple tool all things considered), but from the build rules and customizations we put on top of it over the years, which are not that well documented.