Current Codesmith residents/recent alumni: how has Codesmith delivered on promised improvements announced earlier this year?

Someone reached out who attended this talk and I now actively encourage no one to go to Codesmith... Any alumni who attended - this doesn't seem like a system design talk but rather Will trying to learn about a system he doesn't understand well. Did he talk about pros and cons of different approaches? Did he talk about the decision process for each piece? Was the system large scale and in need of complex decision making? Are the APIs between components discussed in great detail? Are the schemas and data model decisions discussed in great detail? Was there any discussion of a technically challenging problem solved and how they overcame it? Did the system make sense and were good decisions made? Like if someone reviewed it and thought it would just be one service instead that would be a no hire or fire.