Did you read the Dear Leader's blog post? Sounds like true corporation twaddle. Anyway, enhanced search capabilities would be greatly appreciated (if only for one's own account as I think impeding stalking of others is a reasonable motif to have curtailed searchability in the first place). But there are other people already working on browser-based tools for that https://gnusocial.net/conversation/8165533#notice-14507359 without changing the code. We'll see about that.
Groups would be nice, we could get !rain on a broader basis. :-)
But most of all I would love to see the Dear Leader resume Mastodon's support for OStatus. It's my conviction that the decline in number of gnusocial instances is in part due to the lack of interoperability with Mastodon run instances. Not just that #federation doesn't work and gnuscocial instances cannot see and are not seen by other instances. It's that the deliberate policy decision by the Dear Leader to cut OStatus support contributed to people not seeing a point in joining / setting up gnusocial instances which then contributed to the "desertification" of the gnusocial biotop. But in order to grow and scale, it's important to starve the alternatives and create federation monoculture. So the Dear Leader knew exactly what he was doing.
No, I'm not a fan of Eugen Rochko. He did more harm than good to the #fediverse. But he created himself a source of income, so I guess he's content.