So I started working on small hex based project, using Zaria.
The game itself is progressing slowly but steadily. I'm able to iterate relatively quickly and it's very easy to make systems data driven. Overall, not bad, although a lot can be still improved. The effect on the framework and the editor has already been very, very positive. I found a million bugs, identified a million more of annoyances, and one by one I'm getting rid of them.
The biggest problem I have right now is the way objects are identified. Currently the user needs to input a unique string for every object definition. It makes sense for objects that are being used explicitly later on, but the majority are not. What I want to do is to switch to a system, where only some objects have an user generated ID, but all will have an automatically generated UUID (using http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/UUID.html), which will be used internally by all systems to identify definitions.
