They are working supposedly full time. What looks like "meaningless" UI stuff to you is probably also the result of trying to fix timing bugs in the QtWebkit / Qt combo that is used in the wallet, and caused numerous errors in the wallet, like balances not updating on startup etc.. On the one hand debugging these things is pretty difficult, and also the resulting changes in the source code are fairly minimal. If you don't believe that this has been worked on full-time, please ask JBG in Discord what took most of his time.