I hear ya.
It's talking a long time to duplicate the core feature of Universe Sandbox in the full rewrite, but once this is done we can finally start working on new features (like asteroid belts).
That said... shadows. Turns out shadows are complicated, but we've got a simple first pass of shadows working in the latest build and they're awesome. Nods to Georg who wrote the shadow code.
(and don't make a new post, "modify" the previous post if you want to add another comment)