I've looking forward to seeing what the folks down under will have when they release Black Diamond.
Me to 
The project is alive and well, there has been a lot of changes in the last 2-3 weeks, often due to input from interested parties. We froze the design about 3 days ago then had another bright idea, oh well better to try and get it as right as possible.
When implementing various comms, EMAC, SD, and external memory interfaces there are not many pins left for GPIO so don't expect a huge IO pin count. That said what we do have should be quite robust, not just raw pins connected to the big bad world.
I'll post more details on the Black Diamond thread soon.
Rob