to get steay progress u really need at least 20-60 people constantly active. Lugh has more than that theres a few other smaller projects under way but theres something holding the LUGH situation back, the devs arent shedding light just yet, maybe theres something different.
I think the devs have shed quite a bit of light on this. Firstly, there's the civil war cool-down timer. Currently 26 days, but we know the devs are reviewing this and will be testing a smaller time frame soon.
Also, we know that each faction can only have one state active at a time. We've just worked through a boom state and now have to clear the Lockdown state before we can get another state. As I see it (and I'm sure Orfeboy will correct me if I'm wrong

) our job now is to work out how to get Civilwar in the state queue ahead of any other state (my best guess currently is non-lethal weapon missions & trading, backed up with bounty hunting). We have also been told that there are ways to remove unwanted states by actively working against it. Hence our current focus on bounty hunting in order to remove the lockdown state.
All of this we have worked out with a few hints (and a couple of more direct comments) from Michael. I wouldn't have it any other way. FD need to know the system is complex enough to make system flipping difficult and interesting, but also transparent enough that a group of like-minded players can work out what to do themselves. So to say they're not shedding light - or to imply that there's something wrong because we're not getting our way straight away is, in my view at least, disingenuous. Most of us here are here because we want to help test the system, which in itself implies we know it has some flaws. We know there have been (and probably still are) flaws - but we also know that the devs are constantly rolling out fixes to what is being uncovered here and elsewhere (because they've been included in most of the recent patches)
Better still I, for one, am having fun doing it.