I'm curious what ideas people have for the future of BOINC. I've heard rumor a couple extremes, one is merging with folding@home, another is conservative maintenance with few (if any) new features.

Then I realized I've only heard these from rumors on twitter and cryptocurrency forums, and was curious what the actual developers and insiders think, especially with leadership changing.

Are you referring to the entire Boinc system or just to World Community Grid? The latter is under new management and we have an existing thread on that. The WCG web site is now active and I expect it will be about the same once the work units start flowing. When will that happen and what is the next new project are probably the main questions for WCG.

F@H and Boinc are incompatible, and will never merge.
I do hope that Boinc will start running on more devices. Specifically more server based ARM or RISC CPUs; but for that massive parallel CPUs need to become more mainstream.
It's about time, I can buy a 100 core ARM or RISC CPU, that runs at 3 to 4Ghz, and consumes only 30-65W.