FINALLY got something out of the Peregrine devs:

jbos: hi, basically peregrine is stoped
jbos: no ongoing work
Me: @jbos Thank-you for your kindness in responding. Why is that? It looked very promising…
Me: Just 2mth ago it seemed you were going to continue. As I recall you just had some technicalities you were trying overcome.
Me: Please if possible can I get a response before the weekend. I believe it's 5pm in Germany now.
Me: It's hard to get you guys, so some final detail on what happened would be really appreciated! Thank-you.
Me: @jbos? Please! Before you leave for the week-end. Thank-you!
jbos: well
jbos: there are other projects and the N9/N950 is really not a good platform for creating a IM
jbos: with telepathy
jbos: the system uses telepathy and hooks into it quite against the documentation
jbos: so we decide to stop and do new stuff
jbos: didn't make any sense
Me: So, on which platform (F/OSS or not) are you focusing your efforts now?
Me: Do you still plan to implement Skype & GTalk (XMPP/Jingle) video-chat there? Thanks.
Me: @jbos? Sorry to hassle so much, just want to catch you before the week-end! Thanks
Me: @jbos Can I catch you some other time? Just have some more Qns about your latest video-chat work & how (if) I can help.
Me:

No idea why it's been so hard for them just to spit that out, doesn't sound terribly convincing.
I'm leaning more towards no business case because Nokia's no longer backing them etc.