I think it would be good to start planning a 1.8.0 release, so opening an issue to track this (@sgillies).

Remaining issues tagged with the milestone: https://github.com/Toblerity/Shapely/milestone/37

(there are a few older feature requests that haven't seen any movement on the milestone; those can probably be moved to a next milestone / removed from the milestone?)

Regarding the deprecations and changes in preparation of the Shapely 2.0 RFC:

• Deprecations are mostly done (tracked in Deprecations for Shapely 1.8 #932), we still need to decide on the STRtree (Store indices instead of geometries in STRtree + option to keep returning geometries #1064) and deprecation of __len__ (Deprecate len(..) of multi-part geometries #1075)
• A good overview of those deprecations was added in Add migration guide with explanation how to update your code for Shapely 1.8 / 2.0 #1180