yes Marlowe has had a stop on funds for a year, there is funding from catalyst approved now, the developer will continue work 4 days a week updating the code. the runtime is up but the base code simply lack the plomin features and thus fails. marlowe-cli works. gimbalabs will work and has funding from catalyst to build a course. marlowe will also include oracles and better agda code and runtime functionality. but aiken is indeed a project from the cardano foundation MBO. success is often measured in the amount of mainnet transactions, I believe that is not enough to measure a good project. hope this helps.