Well, we'll "recommend" that you turn off barbarians. Just like we'll "recommend" that you turn off cultural city flipping. You can still play with them, we just don't think they make sense, and won't really consider those options when planning out how the mod works.
As for new versions, I'm maintaining, by Friday if your lucky

. Woodelf and I are wrestling with a lot of things right now, without input from the other three team members. We (I?) don't want to rush out another release until we have a few things nailed down. I do expect that this release will be an incremental improvement on the basic concepts you've seen already, along with new, complimentary features. It is unclear if we will be re-doing the tech tree for the releases to come after that.