I shall definitely be developing and running Ring maps, and playing other people's maps, as much as I am able to.
But, as much as I myself enjoy the Ring and would prefer development on the Ring over development on the game itself, I've begun to believe it'd be better to spent the development time on the game. A system like the Ring seems to need a sizeable existing playerbase to really work, and that existing playerbase needs to come out of the actual game.
As for the option to use variables to trigger events, it's been on my wishlist from the beginning. I didn't know it was already implemented and kept hidden, but it doesn't surprise me. The Ring editor has been held back by deliberately placed restrictions since release and it's been no end of annoyance.
