Ghosts of Ragriz're called the 101st now, FYI. Dunno if you remember Hood selling them to Morgan for about two billion or something. Morgan took off, another series of folks ran it. It's slowly degraded over time, esp. since Doc Jameson gave up command.
Lemme see... TBH is now a tiny faction, AW's gone, Reavers're going official (and are widely-known and, amazingly, active). RM's kinda turned into a bit of a capspam faction - and yes, I mean [RM], not just indies. HF's still running strong, and the Order has more horrible indies than any other faction on the server. Kiretsu just died after a strong run as an official faction.
There's a tech restriction chart now, which most sane people agree is horrid. It'll be 2.5 years since the last mod update in December. There's a new House, which basically consists of random french people killing everyone, and very few people really understand why it exists at all. The Sabre is king, and people occasionally decide certain ships are overpowered just because "aces" are flying them (and since these people tend to fly together in the same faction, they tend to use the same ships).
Also, turret steering, turret zoom, weapons splitting, and some other cool capship stuff. Also, I'm disgusted with this game (not mod or community, just game), so I'm not really here, I'm just roleplaying a Disco player.:P