How is the conversion to vulcan going?
Conversion to Vulkan is proceeding well. I don't have details, nor time to completion, though, as per usual.
Regarding the rest, in no particular order:
To be fair, the name for this thread should probably be shortened to "Work progress" only, it would make more sense now.
0.991 version, some of you mentioned, that was available as a beta choice on Steam (it wasn't an alleged fix btw, it was actually fixing the issue), only had the correction of the generation bug causing alternating terra-gas giant sequences, and that's it. Development in the meantime continued, and the fact that correcting that bug means breaking existing saved locations had the developers decide to hold that fix for a much bigger update.
SpaceEngine doesn't really want to mimic other games, otherwise we wouldn't spend development time to transfer scientific knowledge to meaningful code, so saying "SE is going to be obsolete" has no meaning for developers.
And just because NMS was mentioned, I don't think SE will have users teleporting in another place to find their own spaceship magically nearby.
It's a very good program nonetheless, but I'm not sure it will go in the same direction of SpaceEngine.
Or not? Do they share a roadmap with users?
People find in games what they like, the way they like it. Since platformer games and Mario's universes are still a thing after decades, I think there will be always players for SE-based games.