There was actually a lot of development going on outside the official DevTeam, by people such as paxed (host of NAO). When development officially resumed, there were a ton of patches from paxed and other community members that got incorporated, so it really culminated in the addition of a lot of development work that had continued all along.
Now paxed and a few of these other community members are officially part of the DevTeam.
Edit: oops! Fixed the NAO link!