What's the status of the project to create a grammar for Wikitext in EBNF?

There are two pages: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitext_Metasyntaxhttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec

Nothing seems to have happened since January this year. Also the comments on the latter page seem to indicate a lack of clear goal: is this just a fun project, is it to improve the existing parser, or is it to facilititate a new parser? It's obviously a lot of work, so it needs to be of clear benefit. Brion requested the grammar IIRC (and there's a comment to that effect at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7 ), so I'm wondering what became of it.

Is there still a goal of replacing the parser? Or is there some alternative plan?

Steve