Jan Hackel has been making great leaps forward with the quills codebase recently.  After fixing several important bugs, he released (in egg form) 1.7.0b3 versions of Products.Quills and Products.QuillsEnabled a few weeks ago.  (We forgot to announce it at the time.)

Since then, if anything, Jan has picked up the pace - as can be seen from the 'resolved' issues log in the tracker! Pending issues appear to be mainly feature requests (i.e. not for 1.7) or problems to do with remote blogging (i.e. not core). Still, Jan is working on the latter already, so they may yet be fixed before 1.7.0 is released... which should be soon :).

... yes, I'm aware that if we do make it to 1.7.0, it'll be the first 'final' release since 0.9. Quills has been 'beta' for too long, but things are looking much better now and the test coverage is really very good now.