They hired a TerraForm customer named Kristin Laemmert away from Nike and she gave an in depth talk on new language features in HCL such as for loops. She demonstrated a ton of before and after code snippets that included hacks she had to make in HCL to get things to work.

She was pretty clear at least some of the work was in-flight before she started at Hashi so it seems they're using community input as well.