I’m back from the dead, ya missed me? 
Sorry for the lame comeback, and all jokes aside, how has the Panda3D community doing? Any new folks have come the day in age to make Panda3D strive above? Or is it still as is when I first joined?
Also, I want to personally give out my sincere thanks to Thaumaturge, serega-kkz, and rdb for the times I have remembered them helping me out. I want to come back to Panda3D, continue to post shenanigans on why certain features do not work, only to then realize that I am still a noob at Panda3D. 
But actually, I come back because I had a project in mind that I would like to utilize Panda3D on it.
Nevertheless, hope I can contribute to this framework someday, even if it means to point things out in code.
Sincere,
Tyu.
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Welcome back! 
For my part, the thanks are appreciated, and I’m glad if I’ve helped!
As to new people prompting new developments, funnily enough, yes.
Aside from the usual bug-fixes and suchlike, @svf recently started a thread that has become a project to create new sample-programs for the engine. You should find that here:
https://discourse.panda3d.org/t/contribution-ideas-more-game-samples/
That in turn has lead to a project-thread aiming to create a small showcase game. This thread should be found here:
https://discourse.panda3d.org/t/collaborative-sci-fantasy-tech-demo-for-an-official-panda3d-showcase/
And finally, good luck with your project!
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I am definitely new since I don’t recall you, but the forums are doing good.
Also, please try to reduce the number of unnecessary threads (I am not saying stop), so that the forums don’t get littered.
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A community-involved project? I don’t ever recall this before in the Panda3D community, but I will consider this as I continue to learn Panda3D while creating my project. I don’t know if I would really be the right fit for it.
I really hope that Panda3D will grow, both community and framework-wise, as large as Unity. By that, people can finally view Panda3D as an alternative to Unity and not look down upon it anymore.
Yeah, I only joined back in October 2020 and then disappeared in December.
Don’t worry; my threads will mostly comprise of error reports that I am not able to resolve.
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Remember that Unity presumably has resources that Panda doesn’t–including, I daresay, a rather larger development team. Indeed, looking at the Unity web-page, their leadership section includes more people than our entire development team, I believe!
That’s not to say that Panda can’t become a well-thought-of engine (presuming that it isn’t already)–not at all! Rather, I’m just noting that we perhaps don’t have the resources to chase Unity.
And all that said, let me note that Panda’s framework is pretty huge already! It has an impressive array of features; indeed, I still every so often encounter some new feature that I didn’t know that it had!
As a result, I do suspect that more than framework development, what the engine right now lacks is what those projects aim to provide: an improved, updated, and more-impressive-looking set of samples and showcase.
Vulkan is somewhat similar to Panda3D in that it is considered more of a framework than anything else. The Vulkan 1.2 era sample programs are quite simple, actually, showing ultra bare bones functions most of the time. The most impressive as far as I recall are the N-body simulation and a basic lighting demo with a few models in a smallish area. Nothing remotely AAA about them in the naive sense, but Vulkan can power a lot of that, or all of that kind of stuff.
That said, I agree Panda3D just needs some new content to show off what it can do, and I suppose primarily show it off as a game engine.