Thanks for the pointers on who to talk to, and what to look at. I think I might start wikifying some of the current progress as there's too much to sort through in the forums without some kind of index.
And yes, I managed to push out a git change with my minimap demo, and it did take a lot of hair-pulling before I figured out how to do it.
Too many years of cvs/svn habits.
The eclipse part is working well enough to be useable even if it takes a few manual adjustments to get set up. At some point I need to import the coding standard templates, but running checkstyle manually should probably work for now.
I've got a rough draft of a HUDElement management system started, but I think I should have created a new git branch for it -- I'm sure I'll get the hang of git eventually.
As for how Terasology is so highly ranked, it's in a popular language, on a popular game genre, with a great license, with an excellent code base (so far as I've seen so far) , and a lot of active contributors. And it's already at a stage where you can see immediate progress when you're working on the project. A few game developers were talking about java GUI development on the GOG.com forums a couple weeks back, and the one thing we all agreed on was that there was no decent GUI libraries out there. I think what you've got started here is a nice step in the right direction for combining 3d and 2d work, and that's without seeing what NUI is going to provide.