Quote: "Is there any news on the developer that disappeared? I wasn't able to quickly locate any."
Don't think so, the PureGDK section (which later were to become GDK 2) has been pretty dead for about a year as well.
However...
Looking at footer of the
official home page of the project it has had it's copyright year updated to 2013, although Mistrel haven't been heard from since well back in 2012. So that would hint that he's still out there, but that could of course be wrong.
Anyway, the concept of DarkGDK 2 is really quite simple and I believe it wouldn't be very much work to just rewriting it from scratch if somebody felt up to that. However, there might then be copyright infringements, but I'm not sure how that works with what can only be assumed to be abandonware.
"Why do programmers get Halloween and Christmas mixed up?" Because Oct(31) = Dec(25)