Smooth just released a new Aeon roadmap today

The planned rebase is rather comprehensive and will include many Monero improvements including:

LMDB, view-only wallets, message signing, usage of tx keys, Ring CT and a porting of the new GUI wallet to replace the old Neozaru open source GUI whose upstream code is no longer maintained.

Aeon will remain unique in that it will retain 4 minute blocks and the CryptoNight-Lite PoW that is mobile-friendly and allows verifying the blockchain about 4x faster than the CryptoNight PoW. A pruning branch (modified for LMDB) will be maintained. New features such as lightweight encrypted messaging will also be added to the roadmap.

Some of the items from the existing AEON roadmap, such as the ability to perform signature trimming and faster syncing of non-fully-validating nodes, are being incorporated in Monero's RingCT implementation

Some Aeon privacy improvements have already been merged by Monero. One important example was the identification and fix of this leak of the real output in a ring signature when using a very recent output:

The wallet and the daemon applied different height considerations when selecting outputs to use. This can leak information on which input in a ring signature is the real one. Found and originally fixed by smooth on Aeon.

In addition, Monero developers can benefit from observing an in production Aeon pruning branch and other scaling related features. Monero may not adopt these features directly but can reject, modify or otherwise learn from these experiments more than it could from any other cryptocurrency because of the similar Aeon codebase. Having smooth as a developer of both projects helps make both the XMR and AEON codebases easier for developers to understand and compare.