We never had a rigid plan of what should come next, although there are some dependencies that disallow making one thing before the other. It's also affected by our commercial efforts running on the background, but don't fear - these have the same goals, feature-wise.
The closest things that should see the light of day first are:
- the time flow - been making some changes into the generator that will allow for fast updates.
Nature doesn't know about daylight saving, so we are using the universal time instead. The sun position is already computed from the universal time, or from the time-of-day and day-of-year (currently used in sun position tool). I guess there will be multiple options, including the real-time positioning, variable speed up etc. - characters and character animations
From your other points, Blue Marble and Biomes are closely related, and they should come this year. Here's an example of what's being done there:
Biome map with urban areas (black) | 
Urban areas removed |
Current biome maps mark urban areas, apparently because they stand out in the data from sensors. But we need to recreate the natural earth first, and then generate the urban areas atop of it. Here the algorithm tries to replace urban areas with nearby biomes so that a natural layer is created (btw it's Vienna in the center, and Bratislava is to the right).
The urban mask is still preserved, as it can serve as a seed for urban (or ruins) generator in simulators and games.
Other stuff that is probable to come are the rivers and lakes. Coastlines are probably here as well.
The work on the tree generator has been resumed too, though interestingly it is rarely brought up as a priority. But biomes will need it anyway, to produce characteristic vegetation.
