Take from the news sections of elgg.org : Elgg 1.7 will ship with 0 new features. After feedback from users and discussions with the core dev team, we have decided to tackle some bugs that have been found in Elgg core in order to improve Elgg core itself. Though we are excited about the new features we have planned for Elgg, it is agreed that current development time will be better spent making Elgg Core as solid and bug-free as possible.

This all sounds very promising, I for one will be looking forward to this release.