Very sorry to hear you're looking to start a separate project. I understand your frustration with the lack of movement in the project for the last couple months, but it's certainly not from a lack of activity or future but just a temporary situation.
Managing the project is definitely time consuming, but I'd much rather find a way for us all to work together rather than duplicating effort and ending with competing and incompatible products that are not as good for anyone.
Part of what has made progress on Liquibase look so slow lately is because I have many different issues within Liquibase that interrelate to each other and it is difficult to make progress on them all and so they all suffer.
You mention improved I18N work, working integration tests, Java 8 support, and merging pull requests.
I have no excuse for the pull request backlog. They are great to get and I'm thankful for all that come, but they take time to look through and vet for unexpected side effects--especially when the integration test suite is lacking and so I can't trust it. Then the backlog keeps growing and it becomes overwhelming. I'm sorry to all the people who have taken the time to contribute pull requests and I have not yet gotten to them.
Testing, modernizing the code, and I18N have ended up fitting into Liquibase 4 which started out as a fork but ended up being so different it is now a completely separate codebase https://github.com/liquibase/liquibase4. I've always been very careful about changelog and API compatibility and so there is a lot in the existing Liquibase codebase I can't easily change without breaking that and so work is being done in a separate, clean implementation. Besides the use of Java 8, there is a lot of work done around testing to hopefully avoid a lot of the integration testing issues with have in Liquibase 3.
Unfortunately, with separation of Liquibase 4 and 3 it puts me in a cycle of trying to keep 3 moving along enough while knowing that the time I spend on 3 is just pushing 4 further out. The balance has not been great and 4 is also taking far longer than I'd like, but it's another example of where I would much rather have someone to help with all the work than working as separate projects.
The other reason for a lack of visible progress the last few months is because I'm working on a lot of very exciting Liquibase-related work within Datical that is just yet ready for the public yet. It's all great stuff for Liquibase, but has unfortunately been eating up all my time. Luckily, that should be leveling off soon so I can get back to more standard Liquibase.
If you are wanting to run DB Manul as a separate project I understand and respect that, but if we can find a way to not have a fork I think it will be best for everyone.
Nathan