We struggled with some issues with Panels and CTools this week, but we also got some work done.
The biggest change last week was the removal of the article comment and blog comment features. The motivation behind removing them is that we could just as well use the core functionality here instead of inventing something of our own, which means we can reduce the number of features in the NodeStream package. Less is more sometimes.
We have been working on getting Entity Reference into NodeStream for a while now. In order to make that happen, we had to land a few patches though, all of which are in now. The only blocker right now is a bug in CTools when it comes to handling field relationships through foreign key definitions. Issues are here and here. We should be able to finally make the switch once that blocker is out of the way.
As promised, a new release of NodeStream will be available on Friday (2012-02-03).