I too have been very grateful for the effort from so many have put into bring the mega1284 to fruition for so many of us members.
My main concern is on the software support side. The ManiacBug files most of us use haven't been updated in like two years and is probably 2 or 3 IDE versions behind. For example the lack of pinMode(pin#, INPUT_PULLUP) isn't recognized and I'm sure there are other other minor things that aren't up to date. A refresh by someone good at this kind of stuff would sure be nice and of course getting the arduino developers to support the 1284P directly would be the best solution, but that is asking for too much I know. 