I'm sorry that nobody involved with eggheads has replied to this, but here goes, although a bit late. Keep in mind that posting on this unofficial message board is not the way to get involved with Eggdrop development. A better method would have been to contact someone on IRC, or to post to the development mailing list.
You can get an overview of the missing pieces on the Trac page, which is linked from the eggheads site. The tickets marked "blocker" are mainly what's holding 1.8 back from being released, although it's not the be-all end-all plan. If you want to help out, feel free to submit patches to
patches@eggheads.org Or alternatively, contacting one of the developers in undernet or freenode #eggdrop.