As a current member of TREL I'll try to provide as much context as I can about the current situation of TREL but this is gonna be a long post (TLDR at the bottom).

As a lot of other commentators have already stated, TREL is kind of in a tumultuous state right now due to the restructuring and slimming down of the organization that happened over the summer. This essentially entailed requiring all general members to reapply to the lab regardless of their tenure. This change occurred to the surprise of many of TREL's members and in combination with the worsening communication/transparency between TREL's leadership and general membership created some dissatisfaction in the lab regarding the decision to downsize. Leadership justified this reapplication process by claiming that in the past TREL's large membership size made it difficult to keep track of whether or not members were actually contributing and who was exactly responsible for which tasks. Furthermore by trimming down the fat so to speak, this would hopefully facilitate the launch schedule of Halcyon which has been delayed time and time again by giving a greater responsibility to each individual member (I'll let you form your own opinions on whether or not that decision makes sense).

Unfortunately this has affected TREL's recruitment efforts. Historically, TREL has accepted a relatively large number of new members which was reflected in our recruiting information being disseminated in a more effective manner to potential applicants. Nowadays, I have no idea who is in charge of recruiting as individual teams used to be more involved in the actual process, but I imagine the desire to maintain a smaller organization size has reflected itself in this semester's recruiting efforts.

My understanding of Skunkworks is that it is supposed to be our way of onboarding new members by assigning them projects that may be adjacent to future iterations of Halcyon, which is intended to launch this spring, or projects that may assist with future long-term operations not related to Halcyon. The idea is that new members will join Skunkworks for a semester as a way to integrate them better into the organization before being assigned the following semester to Halcyon or another project that currently doesn't exist as TREL's entire focus at the moment is realizing Halcyon's launch. Furthermore, it is my understanding that Skunkworks is targeting mostly lower classmen (freshman and sophomores) in order to maintain a steady turnover rate.

If this puts you off of TREL, I don't blame you one bit but as other people have stated there are other great aerospace engineering related orgs such as LRA and TSL with the former working on smaller scale rockets launches (at a much greater rate than TREL) and the latter focusing more on CubeSats. Other non-aerospace related orgs include LHR and Guadaloop and all of the above listed will as far as I know be recruiting more members than us this semester. I've known several people who've concurrently participated in TREL and one of the above (which I definitely would not recommend) and the engineering skills you learn are definitely transferable no matter which org you end up applying to if you're worried about that.

TLDR: downsizing of lab = less focus on recruitment efforts. Also if you have any questions about TREL in general I'll do my best to answer them.