Easy Screencast Recorder is definitely *not* abandonware.
However, it is in an awkward state where it's really not easy and painless to use, and it's hard for me to really recommend it whole heartedly except to users who have very specific needs. That's the main struggle i have with it -- finding a use case where ESR could be a tool of choice.
We should continue this discussion on
this thread, but i think what i would really appreciate is if there are people who have checked out the competition and can help me identify some small set of essential features that would make ESR a tool of choice for some scenario, and a set of key features that need to be added to ESR to make it genuinely useful.