Bravo on keeping Asrai alive, good work all involved!
Regarding further mergers of any sort, I'm happy with whatever route the site owners and users collectively consider best.
I'm not using Ulthuan much these days for reasons described above (have mostly migrated over to HBE on 9th Age), but I miss Ulthuan. The tone over there is pretty toxic a lot of the time. There's a lot of folks arguing that nerfs are fundamentally terribad for HE and should never happen over their dead bodies because literally everything we have is weak. There's a lot of folks saying we're just waaaaay to OP. In the same thread. (And, because in and of itself that would be OK, but the language, arguments and tone is all pretty toxic). I don't know because it's a difference in mods/culture, or the fact that it's in the game development phase and people feel it's a 'war' and they need to defend 'their side' against the ravages of the nerfbat, and perhaps also ravage other armies with said bat? But there seems to be very little listbuilding activity, little blog activity, few full bat reps, etc etc. The painting section includes a really nice gallery but I don't see the cool thing happened here. It's kinda like the site has the users but not yet a community if that makes sense?
Whether that means there's still a niche for Ulthuan as the more mature 'gaming club' online forum compared to the 9th Age 'GW store' style environment I'm not sure, or whether 9th Age would benefit from porting not just users but actual content and mods from Ulthuan (as a distinct Ulthuan subforum in HBE probably rather than in the toxic bits?)...but that wouldn't cope well with our nice painting sections, or with other systems like KoW (which I strongly associate with 'our' SM now), or 8th, or

AoS

...
Regardless, I'm glad Ulthuan still floats and I'm glad we've saved Asrai. FWIW, 9th Age isn't a secure platform yet - as a gaming system it has the support of ETC and looking a the user map is strong in Europe, but the scene in UK is horribly horribly split, US seems to be strongly KoW, Ozzies seem to be doing their own thing and 9th in equal measure so far as I can tell...after a year or two of ETC 9th Age may fall, and then what...???