I've just had a look at the ASE forums. There is a forum admin (Sapiens) and an ASE coder (Ecks) that post there. They are the only people doing any work related to ASE.
But in one of the posts they actually state that they are NOT PAID EMPLOYEES OF YAHOO! I suppose Ecks was paid to put the Yahoo banner and logo into ASE, and then they continued to let him have access to the source code and the scanner servers. Anyway, now they're both just working on it in their (seemingly very limited) spare time.
So the whole thing is just make-believe. What is really going on is probably that Yahoo is preparing their own Gamespy Arcade clone. Which is probably going to be as unusable as GSA if you don't pay for it.
So in effect, Yahoo has bought ASE just to kill off the competition, so they can sell their own craptastic replacement. Or maybe it's somehow related to the whole Xfire issue, since those guys were working for Yahoo originally. Maybe they were the ones suppposed to improve ASE, or make its replacement. We'll probably never know.
I've tried kquery, qtracker, hlla, hlsw etc. but none of them can match the usability of ASE. I don't have Q4 or BF2 yet, but for those who do, there are instructions on the ASE forum how to get them working. For Q4, it involves downloading the server list from a web page, since the scanner servers don't work. But you don't have to fix the filters.txt file, since that is fixed in the latest version.
UP YOURS, YAHOO!