Are we waiting for milestones to be implemented/fixed/tested or is has the lead developer taken a sabbatical?

I must disagree on both points. Compiling Qt statically is no small feat, but for very good reasons. Mudlet is a relatively small project, and the dependencies are clumsy, which is what I see as the primary reason for delays between official releases.

While your efforts are appreciated, this is easily the most complicated set of instructions I've ever seen for compiling anything.

The first draft of QRegularExpression didn't return the names for the named capture groups, so I requested that feature and it was finally added. It's PCRE-compliant, too, unlike the old QRegExp, so I definitely recommend it. You have a good point with the functionality in libzip, but it might be so...

Does Mudlet still need the external dependencies for zip files, regular expressions, etc? Qt 5 supports more of these things now.

Huh. Turned out that the profile was just screwed up from doing copy/delete/new/edit a few times. Mudlet got confused on what address/profile I was using, and I couldn't tell that it was using the wrong thing. Clearing out my profiles and starting over made it connect properly with the IP address.

When I try to put in the dotted IP address of a server, I get an error trying to lookup "server" as the hostname. Could Mudlet be fixed to properly handle IP addresses in place of hostnames? (This was on 1.2.0-pre6.)