The "girl" Eloraam has a real life job that is more important then a mod
Also she has been hanging out on Forgecraft (the community, not the server), so the reports of her being AWOL are greatly exaggerated.
Redpower has an extra issue that other mods don't have, though - it's coded in a way that makes it incompatible with an alternative Java VM branch called JRockit. This is a high performance JVM that's currently available for manual download if you have an Oracle account, but will replace the current "Hotspot" JVM you get as a consumer when the Java 8 update rolls around, because JRockit
significantly outperforms Hotspot. I tried it, and believe me, it's a staggering difference.
So not only is Redpower currently incompatible with the next major Java release, but it is also incompatible with Forgecraft itself, because that server runs on JRockit already. Therefore even if Eloraam had the time to develop stuff, she couldn't use the test server until she rewrites Redpower to run on JRockit. That might be a quick fix, but it might also be something that requires a major rework. We don't know.
Also, it's quite possible that she skipped 1.5.x intentionally because of the large amount of changes required, and is working on a 1.6 build instead. Maybe we will see Redpower show up again once Forgecraft goes 1.6, but with Forge itself still not officially stable it will probably take another week or so before that happens.