Does anyone now if there are any news about the vertical Properties Tabs? This is kind of essential because without it the purpose of the single-column layout is defeated.
Looks like the next big ticket item to get into 2.8 will be the new subsurf code based on OpenSubDiv. I can’t wait to see it 
Much better creasing and adaptive detail for starters. I hope this can eventually lead to Cycles microdisplacement eventually being viewable in the viewport outside of rendered mode, wouldn’t that be something (perhaps it will mean realtime tessellation for Eevee too).
I am also interested in seeing the new subdivision code working. Right now trying to use OSD results in an instant crash to desktop.
What’s going on the bevel modifier improvements GSOC project? The weekly reports for it just stopped a few weeks ago, and nothing in the devtalk thread either.
The logs seem to show him on the home stretch to finally getting his work into 2.8 (mostly cleanup and a few other things).
Hmm strange how come Dr is saying this? Make feel a bit suspicious about all this politeness. What all this about hm I will spend couple sleepless night trying to figure out the mystery behind Dr Politeness. 
The mentor for this project showed up shortly after the meeting and had the following to add :
he did ok, will likely merge his branch to 2.8 soon (includes previous summer’s work on custom normals too).
Stoked to see that opensub D is coming but we got to complete circuit and see render side sub-division in cycles. Creases are a waste of time if you don’t have highly subdivided surfaces especially those that are not set at 1.
Custom normal modifier is a must-have
this feature was introduced 2 years ago
https://en.blender.org/index.php/User:Maiself/Micropolygon_Displacement
on the bottom is an example for the cycles subdiv / crease feature
Not everyone might know about it though because you have to switch the Cycles feature set from ‘supported’ to experimental (otherwise you can displace the mesh, but you can’t dice in an adaptive way).
The reason why it isn’t in the official yet is because it lacks a couple of things like subdivided UV’s (which at the time was due to a limitation in OpenSubDiv itself).
I know about that one but that feature has not been complete for some time now and has been marked as experimental so maybe I should have said it needs to be made production ready.
But even prior to that IIRC Cycles did do render side subdivision very early on but that was also an experimental feature.
Few updates from Brecht—I updated the OP, but here they are too:
That is true, but the feature prior to Mai’s work did not update in the viewport on changes, did not support UV coordinates, did not support multiple materials, and was rather prone to crashing.
The use cases if you got it to work was extremely limited.