Well, digging around a bit more about Emeraldgate... it appears the one now running the official Emerald website was one of the three LL specifically wanted removed from the project, with one of the other three kinda sorta still involved even though supposedly not involved, and the more respectable devs have bailed.

It is interesting that there seem to be about 40 different clones of Emerald (well, 40 different sets of sources of them) at Google Code:

http://code.google.com/p/emeraldviewer/source/clones

I suspect one of those will become the dominant version, or another one separate from that, with all of the good and non-troublemaking members of the old devs rallying to it, and with all the "suspicious stuff" removed, but appearing under a new name... and the ones now left in charge at the current, official emerald website, who apparently are keeping the rights to the name... will be left holding an empty sack.

One thing I can't tell from here is.... what became of the SL2.x-enabled version of Emerald that was in the works for months, and if that code is included somewhere at Google Code. I hope it is there, and/or that the respectable members of the dev team that were developing it still have enough of those sources that they can be cobbled back together again if not, so that that line of Emerald can be continued in a fork.

In any event, for the time being at least, more out of inertia than anything else, I'm continuing with the latest Emerald release until some independent offshoot of it comes along (probably not Emergence, since that's not being continued either and is from a slightly older version of the sources) or until LL blocks it, whichever comes first.

I've used Imprudence as well, though, and currently use it on other grids... and might wind up using that on SL if the current Emerald gets blocked. But at the same time I am actively watching for an Emerald offshoot that IS being maintained and DOESN'T have anyone or anything potentially suspicious included.