It seems to me that the VPython folk are the perfect ones to pick up the IDLE development reins. They're actively working on IDLE already, have already implemented the autosave mentioned, as well as some others, and generally seem willing and interested. I'm not sure what the reasoning is for keeping the VPython IDLE off in its own fork and not bringing it in as the official IDLE, since it is being actively developed.
I think it was that I wanted to keep control over the direction in which IDLE was going. The idle-fork SourceForge project was created so they could do their development. But I don't think much happened there, and I haven't really done much except stifle IDLE development, so I'm ready to relax my control. I do have that subprocess-running code which I would like to get worked into IDLE first though... --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)