Keep in mind that 2017 is the year of the Linux Desktop.
I don’t think we’ll see many new features in Citra this year either. A lot of features take at the very least 2-3 month to be worked on (in freetime) and then another month for integration and testing.
As Citra progresses the time for testing will increase to avoid any regressions / breaking of existing features.
So if you didn’t hear of a feature yet, it’s unlikely that it will be integrated before the end of the year. There are some exceptions to the rule, but generally don’t overestimate the speed of Open-Source projects.
(Citra’s version 1.0 was planned for a couple of years ago but it still hasn’t reached all required original goals!)
Some very basic features which are still necessary are (but not limited to): NFC / Amiibos, Mipmaps, Cubemaps, Geometry shaders, Emulation of different shader units, accurate Shader emulation (bit-level-accuracy), accurate emulation of the VFP flags (broken still), a good and stable Debug interface, a good software renderer, JITs for other architectures, basic conditional features to improve portability, common code to make platform specific UI easier, gamepad support, hardware tests, a hardware test infrastructure, …
Renderer wise (what I mostly worked on) I also think we should get rid of OpenGL and focus on Vulkan or other APIs. We currently add a lot of workarounds and increase complexity when we should just use more modern technology. This, however, is not possible because we don’t have portable and fast renderer. In fact, our software renderer is way behind the graphics renderer and is often unusable.
Also speaking with Dolphin developers: it’s easy to do emulation with a lack in architecture and design. So even if the emulation is okay, the emulator could still be a mess (which will pose problems in the future when portability or modularity is important).
There are also some non-technical challenges to overcome such as spending the donation money wisely and supporting developers (for example, by buying rare and local games, preserving and testing them).
We also still couldn’t find people to maintain a blog which should be a priority to attract more capable developers and freeing the support staff by answering the posts in a more central location.
Citra also struggles with community decentralization and fragmentation due to Pokemon users not caring about 3DS emulation but only Pokemon. Similarily there is a piracy scene which is too closely related to Citra which is probably not good for the project either.
Some non-goals also exist which I hope won’t be worked on in 2017 (but I fear we’ll get a lot of questions about these still). This includes code-refactors where a working solution exists, new video backends while maintaing the existing ones (especially proprietary solutions such as Metal and D3D), impossible features such as cheats or premature attempts to turn the HLE into LLE, ports to platforms which require massive code changes and the like.
Some of those should certainly happen in the future, but the pre-conditions are not met yet.
Something else to keep in mind is that we are aiming for “playable” and not “enjoyable”. I’d assume we’ll be at “playable” before 2019 for most games, but “enjoyable” for the majority is probably not going to happen before 2023 (and I’d say that’s quite optimistic)