Maybe the number of Workbench users is really very very small and therefore WRI staff thinks it should not be worked on with high priority? Or they do not care anymore about serious programmers? Which I doubt. So maybe there is something else, like they work hard on my suggestion to implement parallel MUnit testing. Or they fix this very strange FrontEnd bug which causes each notebook to be opened always two times, when clicked, or they are speeding up the slow documentation building process or they improve the buggy parser ( turning a whole .m file sometimes red) or they follow my suggestion to always immediately include Workbench with normal Mathematica, please with an improved debugger and profiler). Or, even more exciting: imagine they would come up with an improved, more JLink-package-like library (BeginPackage ) mechanism.

So who knows: maybe five developers are working hard to surprise us positively. I really was very much positively surprised by things like Encrypt, Inactive, RunProcess etc. in V10.

George, thanks for your suggestion. I've actually got new WB3.. yet it did not solve my problem. Workbench won't open an nb file or build the project. It seems from the searches I've done it might be a java problem or an "ant" problem yet it is beyond me what that means.