MES may have a big push but that is a separate group of developers all together.
We have been doing testing with Java 8, however, most of the testing has been with compatibility.
Right now there is still no news as to a dedicated mobile application. I am sorry that you feel the mobile module is very dated. We did recently update the mobile module to support Java 7. The mobile module was greatly overhauled during this process. If you have not already, I do encourage you to check it out.