I can assure you MATE gets a lot of attention behind the scenes. It's like a duck on the pond though, on the surface it looks like nothing much is happening but underneath the maintainers and developers are exceedingly busy with it.
they have already ported it to GTK+3 very successfully and are working on Wayland compatibility. as for the GUI it is meant to look old school since it's a fork of GNOME 2. there are a couple of new things added though there's advanced MATE menu, and brisk menu. I don't know if Fedora's build of MATE has brisk menu but it certainly has advanced MATE menu from ubuntu since wolgang who maintains Fedora MATE packaged it. Both Advanced Menu and Brisk are similar to W7 start menu in that you have a tiled layout with a search box to quickly find applications. they can be initiated from the super key as well.
http://wiki.mate-desktop.com/roadmap